The Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia have been in continuous publication since 1954 and have sold over 120 million copies in 41 languages. C.S. Lewis was awarded the 1956 Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, the final book in the Narnia series. The books were written by Lewis between 1949 and 1954 but were written in neither the order they were originally published nor in the chronological order in which they are currently presented. The original illustrator was Pauline Baynes and her pen and ink drawings are still used in publication today.

• The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
• Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• The Silver Chair
• The Horse and His Boy
• The Magician's Nephew
• The Last Battle

Reading Order

Fans of the series often have strong opinions over the correct ordering of the books. When the books were originally published, they were not numbered. The first American publisher, Macmillan, put numbers on the books in the order in which they were published. When Harper Collins took over the series in 1994, the books were renumbered using the internal chronological order, as suggested by Lewis' stepson, Douglas Gresham. On the point of publication order, scholars who have written about Narnia agree: the books were not published in the order that they were written.

To make the case for his suggested order, Gresham quoted Lewis' reply to a letter from an American fan in 1957 who was having an argument with his mother about the order:

I think I agree with your order [i.e. chronological] for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.

In the Harper Collins adult editions of the books (2005), the publisher asserts Lewis' preference for the numbering they adopted in a notice on the copyright page:

Although The Magician's Nephew was written several years after C. S. Lewis first began The Chronicles of Narnia, he wanted it to be read as the first book in the series. Harper Collins is happy to present these books in the order which Professor Lewis preferred.

Some readers who appreciate the original order believe that Lewis was simply being gracious to his youthful correspondent: he could have changed the books' order in his lifetime had he so desired. They maintain that much of the magic of Narnia comes from the way the world is gradually presented in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They believe that the mysterious wardrobe, as a narrative device, is a much better introduction to Narnia than The Magician's Nephew - where the word "Narnia" appears in the first paragraph as something already familiar to the reader. Moreover, they say, it is clear from the texts themselves that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was intended to be read first, and that The Magician's Nephew was not. When Aslan is first mentioned in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, the narrator says that "None of the children knew who Aslan was, any more than you do". Fans of the original order point out that this is nonsensical if one has already read The Magician's Nephew.