
The Innkeeper Chronicles
urban fantasy
Series · fantasy
The Warriors Novellas series by Erin Hunter has 7 books and is best read in publication order, starting with The Untold Stories (2013).
Start here: The Untold Stories (2013) — then read straight through in publication order.
The order the books were released — the default way to read the series.
Beyond the numbered main arcs and the longer Super Editions, Erin Hunter's Warriors world has a third layer: short novellas, most only a chapter or two longer than a single Warriors short story, each filling in one specific gap in Clan history that the main arcs never had room for. What happened to Hollyleaf in the tunnels after she vanished from ThunderClan? Why did Mistystar nearly force her own medicine cat to step down? How did Tigerclaw actually become Tigerstar, leader of ShadowClan, in the stretch of time the main arcs skip past in a few sentences?
Rather than being sold individually forever, these novellas were bundled three at a time into a run of bind-up volumes -- The Untold Stories, Tales from the Clans, Shadows of the Clans, Legends of the Clans, Path of a Warrior, A Warrior's Spirit, and A Warrior's Choice -- with the first four originally released as individual e-books before HarperCollins collected them into print. Twenty-one novellas in total have appeared this way since 2013, spanning ThunderClan founders, ShadowClan villains, RiverClan medicine cats, and quiet background warriors whose one moment of consequence never made it into a main-arc book.
None of the novellas is required reading for following the main Warriors story. They exist purely as deep-cut supplements: short, self-contained answers to the kind of "but what about--" questions that only accumulate after you've already read enough of the main arcs to have them.
21 individual novellas have been published as of 2026, collected across 7 print bind-up volumes released between 2013 and 2021: The Untold Stories, Tales from the Clans, Shadows of the Clans, Legends of the Clans, Path of a Warrior, A Warrior's Spirit, and A Warrior's Choice.
No. They're short, optional supplements that fill in specific backstory gaps for cats already introduced in the main arcs -- none of them is required to follow the ongoing story.
Any order. Each bind-up volume collects three unrelated novellas about three different cats, and the volumes themselves don't build on each other.
The first four bind-ups (The Untold Stories through Legends of the Clans) collect novellas that were originally published individually as e-books before being bound together in print. Path of a Warrior onward were compiled directly into print bind-ups.
No new bind-up has been announced since A Warrior's Choice in 2021, though HarperCollins has not formally ended the line.
Reading order last verified .