The best mermaid books

All The Stars & Teeth is everything I want in a seafaring adventure, with pirates, mermaids, sea monsters, and a world with seven unique types of magic – including blood magic.

Plus, a feisty and flawed female main character who will stop at nothing to save her kingdom. The world is lush and vibrant, the found family vibes give you all the feels, and the slow burn enemies to lovers is full of banter and tension.

Plus, it’s a duology so when you’re sad the book has ended, have no fear because the next one will be waiting for you! 

Skin of the Sea is a beautiful blend of West/Central African mythology and alternate history to give us an imaginative story featuring a mermaid protagonist. Simidele is a water spirit, Mami Wata, whose job is to gather the souls of [enslaved] people who die on the seas. This concept alone makes the book interesting, but it is also a fast-paced story that never ignores its most powerful aspect—the mythology and the fantastic ocean world. The story is lyrical and atmospheric, and takes you along for an unforgettable journey into the waters.

Nia's lifelong dream is to become an avatar, one of the ruling mermaids of Atlantis. But when she is passed over for the opportunity, she must embark on a quest to prove herself. This journey takes her far beyond the sea and everything she knows to the world of dry land. Arthurian legends, mermaids, magic, Atlantis, a heroine’s journey – how can you go wrong?

Pui-Mun Law has been one of my favorite artists since I discovered her website over twenty years ago. She is an accomplished artist, and her books are not only filled with beautiful artwork that will inspire any fantasy artist, but also contain very detailed tutorials and sketches.  Although the tutorials focus on finishing pieces using watercolor, this book is also filled with beautiful pencil sketches and guides on drawing different poses, body parts, and scenery to suit your fantasy character. Her watercolor style is uniquely detailed and precise, which makes the book a great reference for artists using drawing mediums as well. 

It’s impossible not to fall head over heels in love with the little mermaid explorer Oona and her sea otter friend Otto. The adorable duo was created by illustrator Raissa Figueroa who has this amazing ability to make all her characters completely irresistible and her environments rich with atmospheric colors and magical details. I can’t wait to see what adventures Oona and Otto go on next!

This book has this soft slow kind of magic that would be wonderful for winding down right before bedtime. The images flow through the book and guide you down into the colorful glowing depths where a family of mermaids guard the secrets of the sea. The message is lovely as well. Little Pearl the mermaid discovers that even the smallest of responsibilities, when nurtured properly, can grow to be hugely impactful.

The Merry Spinster falls into my big bucket of fairytale retelling faves, but it hardly sticks to tradition: rather than simply following old plots, Lavery draws on the tone and style of classic fairy tales to create a gender-warped world where daughters use he/him pronouns and mermaids are sort of, but distinctly not, girls. Even better, the playful attitude towards gender now seems to foreshadow Lavery’s own coming out and transition, both occurring after he published this book—something that fills me with a special kind of trans-author love. Reading this for the first time, I had the sensation of slipping pleasantly into an utter dreamworld of gender/sexuality beauty, like a warm bath: I recommend you fall in, too.

It’s easy to find books about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and witches… but very rarely do you stumble across a young adult book about sirens. Not the mermaid kind (we’ve already covered mermaids), but still sinister, manipulative, and dangerous. Despite this threatening presence, this book is absolutely hilarious and a fantastic adventure. It’s also an LGBT story written by an LGBT author who has always said that this was a book he wrote for his younger self. To let him, and kids like him, know that he’s not alone. And I just love that. 

I have included a work of fiction in this list both because it is an extraordinary example of period fiction and because it highlights the potential richness of many of the stories we tell as historians. Several of the books I’ve highlighted in this list, as well as my own work, draw on the records of specific people – often merchants, but also consumers and manufacturers – to explore issues surrounding business history. Imogen Hermes Gowar’s Jonah Hancock exemplifies the risk and uncertainty navigated by early-modern merchants as well as the potential cost of their ambition and expertly navigates the ways in which information spread through the streets and in the coffee-houses of eighteenth-century London. This novel was well-deservedly shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018.

I can’t help it, I am an absolute sucker for a girl dressing up as a boy. It’s a classic trope in lesbian fiction, and while it’s reminiscent of trans masculine narratives, it’s also a fantastical reflection of butch/femme dynamics, and these two things can co-exist in the literary world. Flora/Florian is a really special protagonist, and her relationship with Evelyn is as exciting as the overall story. Tokuda-Hall has clearly had so much fun weaving in a variety of fantasy elements, throwing us mermaids, witches, pirates, and, of course, the Sea. 

Peter Pan was one of the first books that made me want to write and create my own worlds. Neverland was an escape, not only for the Darling children but for my earliest stories. It was a place to be anyone, and go on endless adventures, without the limitations of adult expectations. The characters will always be special to me. We may have to grow up, but we can always keep special places like Neverland in our hearts and strive to create worlds that generations of readers will enjoy. 

One note is that while I will always love this book, it was published in 1911 and I cannot endorse the racist portrayals of Native Americans/Indigenous People. As the historical costume community says, ‘vintage style, not vintage values.’

Returning was a short and sweet read that I happened on by chance. It’s a prequel novella about a siren who’s searching for her very own ‘The One’. With a romance story at its heart and an edgy tone, it’s a fast-paced urban fantasy that I ate up in a couple of days.

I liked the worldbuilding, the crisp dialogue, and the intriguing premise. The book is a little old-fashioned in theme, but oh-so-satisfying in a nostalgic way as you hustle to survive and fall in love right alongside Mira, the main character of Returning.

I’m giving it bonus points because it’s set, in part, in Canada, which is where I’m from. Any time I see even a smidge of my beautiful home country in fiction, it makes my heart smile.

I read this tiny collection of stories after chatting to the author on social media, and it's what got me reading again after two years of barely reading a thing.

Nostalgic, atmospheric, and vivid, these stories are sometimes stomach-churningly brutal. Even though a lot of them deal with the supernatural, it's the most mundane of situations that are the most anxiety-inducing. They took me right back to my own Northern childhood, with all the mystery, boredom, wonder, and terror it entailed. A very emotional collection with as much heart as heartbreak, wrapped up in chiming prose.

When I was doing research for my children’s novel, Secrets of the Last Merfolk, I read lots of stories about mermaids and The Tale of Emily Windsnap was a real favourite. It’s about a girl who discovers that she's half-human, half-mermaid and follows her adventures as she heads underwater to find her missing father. 

Liz Kessler’s debut novel was so popular that there are now nine Emily Windsnap stories, so if you enjoy the first book, you can carry on and read the whole series!

This book had me cracking up. I would recommend this book for kids aged seven to ten but I also think adults would love reading it. Oliver is the child of adventurers who now want to settle down. Well, the itch to adventure is still pretty powerful. So, of course, off they go again. Oliver has to find them so he too goes off to search for them. On his journey, he meets some other creatures, including a mermaid, an albatross, a depressed island, and some very obnoxious weeds. I’m being super non-spoilery and vague here because I want you to happen upon the silly puns and wordplay by yourself. I will also resist the urge to tell you what sea wigs are. 

What I like about this story is that Oliver is a normal kid. His sense of adventure came about second-hand, and he had no great urge to go… show more.

This is another book about supernatural beings of the sea, but this time, it’s all about mermaids! Emerge is the first in a young adult trilogy that follows the modern-day descendants of The Little Mermaid. Author Tobie Easton has absolutely mastered the art of world-building and I would absolutely love to see her underwater kingdom brought to life one day. 

A little girl with an active and playful imagination is why I love this book so much. Sadie spends her days in her own make-believe world with the hours never being long enough for all she wants to see and do. She builds and explores, climbs and reads, having both nature and books as the catalyst to her always brimming imagination. Sadie is what I hope all little boys and girls become – full of big ideas and even bigger possibilities – as they play and grow through the world around them.

The main reason I’m recommending this book is “The Little Mermaid” (the original version, not a sanitized later edition or off-the-mark Disney interpretation). I loved fairy tales as a kid and “The Little Mermaid” is my favorite because it doesn’t have a happy ending. (Not for the mermaid, at least.) I loved that just because we think things should happen a certain way doesn’t mean they will. The mermaid thought she was fated to be with the prince. But all her planning and sacrifice and suffering didn’t change the possibility that the prince was fated to be with the woman he chose. It was an early and valuable lesson for me on seeing things from a different perspective, and inspiration for one of my own short stories.

A huge part of why I write is that I struggle to find books I like written by other people, yet this one came out of left field and bowled me over (Elliot would probably hate that I used a sports metaphor for that). Elliot is the protagonist of this book and he is a walking queer disaster. I love him, I hate him, and I became strangely, desperately invested in him. The book doesn’t have what I would describe as a conventional plot, but Brennan does a fantastic job studying her characters with a depth that got me obsessed. During the few days it took me to read this book (when I had to put it down and do life things) I would huff around the house muttering ‘FFS Elliot!’ under my breath. If you want to know why, I recommend giving it a go.

This was one of the books (along with Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collector) that inspired me to pursue fiction writing rather than poetry.

For the longest time, poetry was my preferred genre, and while I had dabbled in writing fiction, I struggled. It wasn’t until reading The Girl in the Flammable Skirt near the end of my undergrad that I realized fiction doesn’t have to be straight realism—it can be magical, strange, symbolic, weird, fabulist, dreamlike.

Two of Bender’s stories that had the most impact on me were “The Rememberer,” where the narrator’s lover experiences reverse evolution,” and “Drunken Mimi,” a love story between an imp and a mermaid. Maybe not coincidentally, my book also contains a story about a mermaid.