With hundreds of millions of books been written throughout time, it takes a great amount of people to do so. There are endless authors in this world, spanning every country, language, time period, and so on. With so many authors, it can be easy for a good one to get lost among the rest. Throughout this blog, I intend to call attention to three up and coming authors who I believe to be very underrated and underserved the attention they deserve.

The first of these is an author who creates suspense, both in horror and romance. Her books often have a theme of magic and layers of world-ending stakes. Her dark gothic novels are extremely captivating and highly rated, though not rated by nearly as many people as they should be. In her most recent novel, Thrum, Smitherman creates more suspense and confusion (the good kind) than seen before in other books by authors of a similar caliber. Her writing style is beautiful, and her plot twists and plot points are wonderfully gruesome. I am very glad to have been one of the few readers of this short and sweet novel, and I’m confident that many more will read it, as they should.

Completely opposite from the deep dark gothic fantasies that Smitherman writes, Kaliane Bradley writes unique concepts with beautiful prose. Not as unheard of as Thrum, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time has gained much popularity. Barack Obama even called it one of his favorite books of the summer. Kaliane writes in such a beautiful way that it makes her books hard to put down. This writing style combined with her genius ideas makes Bradley utterly digestible. Though I have not read any of her previous books, I can’t wait to see what other bright ideas she puts to page and conjures up in her next novel, and you better bet it will go in my cart within days of it’s release!

Lastly, I just must tell you about THE most underrated author. She has written many books, each of which I find to be extremely beautiful, heart moving, or similar. Mhairi McFarlane is simply an extremely talented author, and I can’t quite write how well she builds stories. In my opinion (which I believe to almost always be correct) McFarlane should be up there with authors such as Emily Henry, Ali Hazelwood, and Elin Hilderbrand in terms of name recognition. Her stories are deep and moving and go beyond simple romances or literary fictions. This Scottish author has many well-read and well-loved books, many being rated by over fifty thousand people. Though she has a large number of purchases and reads in terms of her book sales, her name recognition and following as an author is unjustly small in comparison, with only around eleven thousand followers on Instagram, she is undeservedly underrated. I know she will continue to grow as an author and storyteller, and we as readers can only hope that her following and recognition with parallel this upward cycle.

These three underrated authors are only a small portion of those in the world who have poured their hearts and souls into writing novels that don’t ever lift off the ground. It pains me to know I will never get the opportunity to read every underrecognized authors’ works, yet I know I can try to get through as many as I can accompanied by well known books written by New York Times best-selling authors. I’m sure not every book I read by a not-so-well-known author will knock my socks off in the way the books mentioned above do, but I have to recognize that there are so many incredible books out there just waiting to be discovered and exposed by one of us. We must uncover them!