What Attack on Titan novels are there?

The line opens with Before the Fall (Ryō Suzukaze, art by Thores Shibamoto, three volumes, 2011–12), the invention-of-the-gear prequel later dwarfed by its own manga. Lost Girls (Hiroshi Seko, 2014) is the insider’s entry, written by the anime’s screenwriter. Between them sits the connoisseur’s pick: Harsh Mistress of the City (Ryō Kawakami, art by Range Murata, two volumes, 2014–15), a fall-of-the-walls story illustrated by one of the great anime character designers, published in English by Vertical.

The outlier is Garrison Girl (7 August 2018), an original English-language novel by American fantasy author Rachel Aaron for Quirk Books, later translated into Japanese (as “Roses on the Wall,” 2019): the current of translation running backwards, and a small landmark in how completely the franchise had become American property too. Vertical’s English programme carried most of the Japanese prose to the West, which is why the novels, alone among the spinoffs, are easier to find in English than in their first editions.