If you finished Throne of Glass and now nothing else feels good enough, this list is for you. Not a vague “you might also like” collection scraped from an algorithm, but an honest breakdown of which books actually scratch the same itch, and why each one earns its recommendation. The short answer: start with Fourth Wing if you want high-octane action, The Cruel Prince if you want sharper political teeth, and An Ember in the Ashes if you want worldbuilding that genuinely stays with you. But keep reading, because the differences between these picks matter more than the similarities.
Why Throne of Glass Is So Hard to Replace
Before diving into the list, let us be honest about what makes Sarah J. Maas’s debut series so sticky. Throne of Glass is not just a story about an assassin. It is a ten-year obsession that Maas began writing at age sixteen, posted chapter by chapter on FictionPress under the title Queen of Glass, and quietly built one of the most devoted fandoms in modern fantasy. The story originally appeared on FictionPress.com and became one of the site’s most popular submissions.
The series is available in 15 countries and 35 languages, and the final book, Kingdom of Ash, was released on October 23, 2018, concluding a series that comprised seven books plus the novella collection. That is not a small achievement. That is a decade-long commitment from both an author and her readers.
What makes the gap so painful after finishing is the specific combination Maas delivers: a female protagonist who is genuinely dangerous, not just described as dangerous; a romance that builds slowly enough to mean something; a magic system that keeps expanding in satisfying ways; and a villain whose cruelty never feels cartoonish. The books on this list each carry at least two of those qualities in serious measure. None of them are carbon copies of Throne of Glass, and that is exactly the point. A copy would disappoint you. These are books that operate on a similar emotional frequency.
The Numbers Behind the Fandom
Here is a stat worth sitting with: Sarah J. Maas sold 4.83 million print books between the start of 2024 and June 8 of that year alone, making her the bestselling BookTok author of the year to date and topping the combined sales of the year’s 10 most popular new releases.
Bloomsbury had its highest sales and earning year ever in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, with the publisher crediting much of its success to Sarah J. Maas, whose sales increased 161% for the period.
That is not hype. That is a cultural moment. Romantasy as a genre reached projected sales of $610 million in 2024, with 11 million books sold in just the first five months of the year, nearly double the prior year’s pace. The market has responded to the hunger readers feel after finishing a Maas series, and while plenty of new titles cash in on the aesthetic without the substance, the books below have the emotional architecture to back up the fantasy credentials.
The Books That Will Actually Fill the Void
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
This is the one you start with. No hedging, no qualifications.
Fourth Wing became a viral phenomenon on BookTok, where the hashtags “#FourthWing” and “#RebeccaYarros” have more than a billion views combined. Its popularity led it to reach No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list as well as the No. 1 spot on The New York Times Bestseller list, where it stayed for 18 weeks.
The premise puts Violet Sorrengail, a bookish young woman meant for the Scribes’ Quadrant, into a war college for dragon riders where the failure rate is quite literally lethal. Xaden Riorson, the enemy she must navigate, is one of the more convincingly constructed love interests in recent romantasy. He is not broody for the sake of it; there is genuine political reason for his hostility, and watching the dynamic shift carries real weight.
What makes Fourth Wing a strong Throne of Glass successor is the way it handles stakes. Celaena’s world always felt dangerous because the narrative made you believe in the danger. Yarros does the same with Violet. The dragon-bonding system is inventive and tactile, and the action sequences have a kinetic quality that many fantasy novels talk about but fail to deliver.
Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm, the third book in the series, set a record for the fastest-selling adult title in BookScan’s history, selling over 1 million copies in its first week. That kind of readership momentum means the fandom infrastructure is already there when you arrive.
The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
This is where things get thornier, and I mean that as high praise.
Jude Duarte is not an assassin by training. She is a mortal girl raised in the Faerie Courts after a traumatic childhood, nursing a grudge against the world that has dismissed and endangered her at every turn. What Holly Black does brilliantly is refuse to make the fae charming. They are genuinely cruel. The power dynamics are uncomfortable. And Jude’s response to that environment, her decision to outmaneuver rather than be crushed, is one of the more psychologically interesting character arcs in recent fantasy.
The Cruel Prince is often touted as a great ACOTAR replacement, but it also makes a solid follow-up to Throne of Glass. Considering how rough around the edges the book’s heroine, Jude, is, she feels more like Celaena than ACOTAR‘s Feyre.
That is the key insight. Celaena Sardothien’s defining quality is not her assassin skills. It is her refusal to apologize for who she is. Jude carries the same unapologetic quality, applied to an entirely different but equally hostile world. The political scheming in The Folk of the Air trilogy is dense in the best way, and the ending of the second book, The Wicked King, is a gut-punch that will send you diving for book three immediately.
An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
If Throne of Glass gave you a taste for worlds that feel fully constructed, with history and injustice baked into the geography itself, An Ember in the Ashes is the next natural step.
Sabaa Tahir built her world on the bones of ancient Rome: an empire sustained by military supremacy, slave labor, and the deliberate erasure of conquered peoples’ identities. Laia is a Scholar girl who infiltrates a brutal military academy as a slave to gather intelligence. Elias is a Mask, an elite soldier trained since childhood to be an instrument of imperial violence, who is quietly exhausted by what he has become. Their perspectives alternate, and neither feels like a safe narrator.
“I am no longer a child afraid of the dark. I am the dark.”
Tahir earns that kind of line because she has done the work to make the darkness feel real. The violence in this world is not decorative. The stakes, politics, and themes of An Ember in the Ashes will appeal to those who love Throne of Glass, and the romance throughout the series will likely be another draw.
The fourth and final book in the series is out, so this is a complete read, which is its own form of mercy after living through a series-in-progress.
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
Yes, this is technically the same author. Yes, it still belongs on this list.
ACOTAR and Throne of Glass are not the same reading experience despite sharing a creator. Where Throne of Glass builds slowly toward an epic, A Court of Thorns and Roses drops you into an emotionally dense world from the first chapter and never entirely lets up. Feyre Archeron is a different kind of protagonist than Celaena: less arrogant, more quietly desperate, and the journey she takes across five books is more internal than Celaena’s ever was.
The #ACOTAR hashtag alone boasts over 8.5 billion views on TikTok, with users touting everything from podcasts breaking down complex plot points to fitness challenges to tattoos to immersive in-person events inspired by the series.
The second book, A Court of Mist and Fury, is widely considered among the best romantasy novels published in the last decade. It earns that reputation. If you have not read it, start with book one and do not stop.
From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Poppy, the Maiden, has spent her entire life surrounded by rules designed to control her. Hawke, the guard assigned to protect her, is something else entirely. The first chapter of this book has a specific kind of tension that Armentrout has made her signature: the sense that every line of dialogue is carrying about four different conversations at once.
From Blood and Ash runs five books deep and has spawned a companion series. Armentrout built an entire universe here, and the scope of it rivals the Maasiverse in ambition.
What makes this book a strong Throne of Glass complement is the way it handles reveals. The series is structured around layered secrets, and the satisfaction of watching those secrets unravel across multiple volumes scratches the same itch that the slow revelations about Celaena’s true identity provided. If you remember the reading experience of piecing together who Celaena really was, this series delivers something structurally similar.
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Before BookTok existed, before romantasy was a marketing category, Kristin Cashore published Graceling and quietly did something rare: she wrote a female fantasy protagonist who was genuinely unsettling.
Katsa has a Grace, a supernatural ability that manifests in certain people in this world. Her Grace is killing. The king uses her as an enforcer, and Katsa has spent her life operating in a moral gray zone that she is only beginning to question when the book opens. When she meets Prince Po, who has his own Grace and his own agenda, the partnership that develops is one of the more honest portrayals of two powerful people trying to figure out what they want from each other.
Graceling lacks the sprawling series structure of Throne of Glass, and that is actually its strength. It is a complete, confident story that knows where it is going. It appears consistently on community lists of books recommended for Throne of Glass fans, and it has held that position for years because it earns it every time.
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
If your connection to Throne of Glass is less about the romance and more about the experience of watching a young woman discover the full scope of her own power in defiance of a regime built to suppress it, Children of Blood and Bone is essential reading.
Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic, before a ruthless king had maji killed and her people stripped of hope. Now she has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy.
Adeyemi’s West African-inspired world is extraordinarily realized. The magic system is physical and visceral. And Zélie carries a grief that informs every decision she makes, without that grief ever curdling into passivity. The book sold over a million copies in its first year, and it earned every one of them.
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha Trilogy predates much of the current romantasy boom, and that earlier publication date shows in its structure. These books are leaner and less explicitly romantic than what is trending today, but the Grishaverse as a whole offers something the other books on this list largely do not: a morally complicated antagonist whose appeal is entirely intentional and deeply examined.
The Darkling, the primary antagonist of Shadow and Bone, is one of the most debated figures in modern fantasy fandom. Bardugo writes him with the understanding that power and corruption are seductive in ways that deserve serious treatment, not just dismissal. Alina Starkov, an orphaned soldier who discovers she may be the only person capable of ending her world’s eternal darkness, has to navigate that dynamic with no real guidebook.
Six of Crows, Bardugo’s companion duology set in the same world, is even more universally admired. If Shadow and Bone is a warm-up, Six of Crows is the main event, and the heist-driven structure feels genuinely fresh within the fantasy genre.
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
This recommendation comes with a genuine warning: The Poppy War is not a comfortable read. It is inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking, and Kuang does not soften those historical edges. This is a book that uses fantasy as a lens to examine atrocity, not as an escape from it.
So why is it on a Throne of Glass list? Because Rin, the protagonist, shares something essential with Celaena Sardothien: both characters are genuinely terrifying. Not in the way that characters are often described as terrifying but shown to be warm and approachable. Actually, unsettlingly dangerous. The transformation Rin undergoes across the trilogy is one of the most committed character arcs in modern fantasy, and the worldbuilding, drawing on Chinese mythology and history, has an authenticity that most fantasy world-building lacks.
If you want something that challenges you alongside entertaining you, this trilogy is unmatched.
Truthwitch by Susan Dennard
Safiya and Iseult are best friends with powers that the world’s competing empires want to control. The friendship at the center of Truthwitch is its distinguishing quality: this is a fantasy series where the central relationship is a platonic bond between two women, and Dennard treats that bond with the same narrative weight that most romantasy reserves for romance.
The fact that Truthwitch‘s main characters are forced to go on the run because of their magic and contend with a looming war gives the book stakes and themes similar to those of Throne of Glass. The final book, Witchlight, is making its debut in November 2025, so this one is also perfect for readers looking for something to pick up soon.
The magic system in the Witchlands series is one of the more conceptually interesting ones in this space, organized around different types of magical affinity with their own histories and politics attached.
Kill the Queen by Jennifer Estep
For readers drawn specifically to the court politics and survival competition elements of Throne of Glass, Kill the Queen delivers a tighter, more focused version of that particular fantasy. Everleigh is a minor royal who witnesses her family’s massacre and escapes by hiding among gladiators. The arena sequences have a Roman-influenced grittiness that justifies the Gladiator comparison the book’s marketing leans into.
Pitched as Gladiator meets Game of Thrones, it’s a given that Estep’s 2018 novel has enough political intrigue and action to be a solid Throne of Glass follow-up.
What makes Kill the Queen work as a standalone recommendation is its pacing. Estep does not make you wait four books for the protagonist to fully step into her power. The escalation is faster, and for readers who found the early Throne of Glass installments deliberately slow-burning, that can feel like a genuine relief.
The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
Yes, this is a different order of magnitude. The first book alone, The Way of Kings, is over a thousand pages. The full series will ultimately run ten volumes and is currently on book five. This is not a recommendation for when you want something similar in scope to Throne of Glass. It is a recommendation for when you want to go deeper.
Sanderson’s magic systems are the most rigorously designed in contemporary fantasy. His world, Roshar, is built with geological and ecological specificity that makes it feel like a place that could actually exist. And Kaladin Stormblessed, one of the primary viewpoint characters, carries the kind of burden that makes his eventual moments of triumph genuinely earned.
If Throne of Glass made you interested in the craft of fantasy world-building, The Stormlight Archive is the graduate course.
One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig
One Dark Window is newer and less widely discussed than the other books on this list, and that is a mistake worth correcting. Elspeth Spindle lives in a kingdom where an ancient blight has left people haunted by monsters, and she has her own dark secret: a monster living in her own mind, a presence she calls the Nightmare.
What she did with The Knight and the Moth absolutely blew the minds of many readers in the romantasy community, with some declaring her work stronger than Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, and Throne of Glass.
The gothic atmosphere in Gillig’s work sets it apart from the rest of this list. Where most romantasy operates in bright, high-stakes courts, Gillig’s world is mist-soaked and morally murky. The romance is slower. The horror elements are real. And the relationship between Elspeth and the Nightmare is one of the more genuinely original dynamics in the genre.
The Plated Prisoner Series by Raven Kennedy
Midas has turned Gilded, his favored companion, literally to gold, and the gilding that makes her beautiful also makes her a prisoner. Kennedy uses the Midas myth as a launching pad for a story about the specific kind of power that operates through proximity to powerful men, and what it costs women who have built their identities around that proximity.
The writing in this series is deliberately lush, and the world expands significantly in subsequent volumes. The Plated Prisoner series by Raven Kennedy is frequently recommended alongside Throne of Glass for readers looking for the same immersive world-building experience. The mythology is inventive, the romance is slow-burning in a satisfying way, and Gilded’s evolution as a character is the emotional core of the entire series.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan
Most of the books on this list pull from European mythological traditions. Daughter of the Moon Goddess draws on Chinese legend, specifically the story of Chang’e, the moon goddess, and builds a fantasy world from that foundation with genuine cultural specificity and poetic prose.
Xingyin is not an assassin or a court politician. She is a daughter trying to free her mother, and the motivation is one of the most cleanly human in the genre. The quest structure takes her through celestial realms, mortal kingdoms, and military campaigns, and Tan handles the tonal shifts between those environments with unusual grace.
This is the recommendation for readers who want the emotional stakes of Throne of Glass delivered with more elegance and less heat.
A Note on What This Genre Has Become
There is something worth acknowledging here. Ten years ago, the readership for books like Throne of Glass was largely young adult, largely invisible to mainstream literary culture, and largely female. Today, adult fantasy sales skyrocketed 85.2% over the first six months of 2023 thanks to a huge increase in interest in romantasy.
That surge in visibility has brought with it a surge in supply, and not all of it is worth your time. The books on this list have been selected because they do something genuine with the formula, not because they replicate it. The best of them, The Cruel Prince, An Ember in the Ashes, The Poppy War, take the emotional architecture of a Throne of Glass and use it to say something the original was not interested in saying.
That is what good genre fiction does. It borrows the frame to build something different inside it.
“Libraries were full of ideas, perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.” — Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
That quote has been passed around BookTok for years, and it still lands. The best thing you can do after finishing a series that has claimed space in your head is go find another book that earns it. This list is a place to start.