Start with Twilight. The main saga is four novels narrated continuously by Bella from her arrival in Forks to the end of Breaking Dawn, publication order is also chronological order, and nobody argues for an alternative.
The order question people actually have is about the companion volumes, and there the answer is consistent: all of them go afterwards. Midnight Sun is the first novel retold from Edward's side. Life and Death is the first novel rewritten with the genders swapped — it is not a sequel and it does not continue anything. The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner takes place inside the climax of Eclipse and spoils it comprehensively if read early. None of the three has a plot you do not already know, which is precisely why they only work once you do.
The four, in order
Twilight (498 pages) is the 2005 original and the only possible entry point: Meyer's vampires operate on rules that differ sharply from every earlier tradition, and those rules are all laid out here.
New Moon (563 pages) introduces the Quileute wolves and the Volturi. It is the structural pivot of the saga — Edward is absent for most of it, which is what makes the third book function at all.
Eclipse (629 pages) has the newborn army in Seattle and the triangle at full strength. Read it in place.
Breaking Dawn (756 pages) is marriage, pregnancy and the confrontation with the Volturi. It is the most divisive of the four by a wide margin and the end of the main story.
The retellings, afterwards
Midnight Sun (675 pages) leaked in draft in 2008 and was finally published in 2020. It has no tension of its own, because it is the same plot as book one; what it does is retro-fit motive to a hundred scenes you already have in your head.
Life and Death (400 pages) recasts the first novel as Beau and Edythe, published for the tenth anniversary. Our catalogue stores it under the plain form Life and Death; the published title carries the subtitle Twilight Reimagined. Read it after Midnight Sun, as the second experiment run on the same book.
The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (192 pages) follows one of the newborn vampires from Eclipse. Last of the companions, for the reason above.
The argument about the central relationship
This is worth knowing before you start rather than discovering halfway through. A large body of criticism reads Edward's behaviour toward Bella — the surveillance, the disabling of her car, the insistence that he knows what is good for her — as controlling rather than protective, and reads Bella herself as passive to the point of having no project of her own. A large body of readers reads the same scenes as romance operating on genre conventions that predate the books by a century, and finds the criticism literal-minded. Both are real readings of the same text and this page is not going to settle it. What is factual, and useful: Meyer wrote Life and Death explicitly in response to the passivity charge, swapping the genders to argue that the dynamic was about species and not sex. Whether that answers the objection is exactly the thing people disagree about.
Meyer outside Forks
The Host (640 pages) is her only adult novel: an occupied Earth, a parasitic alien inside a human body, and a love triangle where two of the three share one skull. Stranger than its reputation.
The shelf around it
The Awakening (264 pages) is the first Vampire Diaries book, published in 1991 with nearly the same premise fifteen years before Twilight; our record credits Lisa Jane Smith, the author's full legal name. Vampire Academy is the most seriously worldbuilt of the post-Twilight vampire series. City of Bones swaps romance-first for urban-fantasy-first while keeping the same audience. Hush, hush is the formula transplanted to fallen angels, which is what makes it useful. Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures Series, Book 1) is Southern gothic with a male narrator and a girl with the powers — the mirror image of the setup.
Where to stop
After Breaking Dawn is a complete finish; the companions are for readers who want more of the same world rather than more story. The full ordered path is at the Twilight Saga reading path.
