If you tore through A Court of Thorns and Roses and immediately started mourning the end of the series, you are far from alone. Sarah J. Maas has a rare talent for blending sweeping fantasy worlds with slow-burn romance, morally complex characters, and the kind of tension that makes it genuinely impossible to put a book down.
The good news is that the romantasy genre, where epic fantasy and heart-pounding romance share equal real estate, has never been richer, and there is no shortage of brilliant books waiting to fill that ACOTAR-shaped hole in your heart.
Every book on this list brings something genuine to the genre. Each has its own world, its own voice, and its own reasons to keep you reading well past midnight.
1. The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent (Nightborn Duet, #1)
Oraya grew up as the only human in a world designed to kill her. Adopted by Vincent, the Nightborn vampire king, she has spent her life training, surviving, and carving out a fragile place in a society where humans are little more than prey. Her one path to something real lies in the Kejari: a legendary tournament held once every century by the goddess of death herself, open to warriors from all three vampire houses.
Entering as a human is almost certainly a death sentence. To survive even the early rounds, Oraya is forced into an uneasy alliance with Raihn, a rival competitor who is ruthless and mysterious, an enemy to her father's crown, her greatest competition in the arena and somehow the one person in this brutal world who seems to actually see her.
Set across a richly imagined vampire world split between three great houses and threaded with divine mythology, this book delivers on every promise it makes. The central enemies-to-lovers romance earns every beat of its tension, the world-building is intricate and dark, and the ending will genuinely shatter you. It became a New York Times bestseller after originally being self-published, a testament to how powerfully word of mouth moved through the romantasy community. Read the sequel immediately after.
2. Dire Bound by Sable Sorensen (The Wolves of Ruin, #1)
There are books you enjoy and books that consume you entirely, and Dire Bound firmly belongs to the second category. This is one of those rare debut novels that arrive feeling fully formed. A dark, high-stakes world with a heroine who earns every page she's on, a magical bond that is unlike anything else in the genre, and a slow-burn romantic tension so expertly layered it becomes genuinely difficult to breathe through.
Meryn Cooper has spent her life scraping by in poverty, fighting in underground rings to keep her family fed, and staying out of the way of the Bonded, the kingdom's elite warriors who form mental links with massive, vicious direwolves and live in luxury while the rest of Nocturna suffers. She has never wanted anything to do with them. Then her little sister Saela is kidnapped, stolen across the border by the Siphons, immortal monsters the kingdom has spent centuries fighting, and Meryn's entire world collapses into a desperate goal: get to the front, cross the border, and bring Saela home.
The only way there is through the army. The only way through the army, as fate would have it, is through the Bonding Trials, a brutal four-month gauntlet where soldiers risk their lives attempting to forge a mental bond with a direwolf. Most do not survive the attempt. Meryn throws herself in anyway.
What she does not expect is to actually bond. The direwolf who chooses her, called Anassa, refuses to communicate, leaving Meryn fighting blind through training designed to expose every weakness she has. Her classmates would happily spill her common blood. Her instructor, Stark Therion, is as cold and merciless as the wolves themselves. And then there is Lee, the soldier who befriends her, the one person in the castle who seems entirely on her side.
What makes Dire Bound extraordinary is the texture of everything around the central romance. The wolf bond that mirrors Meryn's own emotional walls, the buried history of the kingdom that begins surfacing through forbidden books and strange carvings, the class warfare threaded through every interaction, and a found family forged in one of the harshest environments imaginable. The secrets the castle is keeping are genuinely unsettling. The ending lands with just the right kind of explosive force.
Originally self-published before being acquired by Hachette's Requited imprint, Dire Bound is a phenomenon the romantasy world is still catching up to. It is on another level entirely, and if you read only one new series from this list, make it this one.
3. The Songbird and the Heart of Stone by Carissa Broadbent (Shadowborn Duet, #1)
Still within the Crowns of Nyaxia world but following an entirely new pair, this is the book that many readers of the series consider its most emotionally devastating entry, and given how brutal the Nightborn Duet already is, that is saying something.
Mische was once a devoted priestess of Atroxus, the sun god, chosen at eight years old for his Order of the Destined Dawn and given a life of light and purpose. Then, a Shadowborn vampire prince named Malach forcibly turned her against her will, stripping her of her humanity, her sun magic, and the divine connection she had built her entire identity around. By the time we meet Mische in this book, she has killed Malach for what he did to her, and the House of Shadow wants her dead for it. Captured and sentenced to execution, she has run completely out of road.
The person who saves her is Asar Voldari, the bastard prince of the House of Shadow and its feared Wraith Warden, a man whose reputation for brutality precedes him into every room he enters. The goddess Nyaxia has given him a mission that may be impossible: descend into the underworld and resurrect Alarus, the dead god of death. Mische's lingering connection to Atroxus makes her the only one who can help him navigate it.
There is a catch that makes the whole thing exquisitely cruel. Atroxus appears to Mische in secret with his own set of instructions: help Asar complete the mission and then betray him by killing the very god they are trying to resurrect. Mische is therefore forced into the underworld, carrying a secret that could destroy the only person standing between her and death, on a journey through sanctum after sanctum of supernatural trials, vengeful ghosts, and the accumulated weight of everything both of them have lost.
The romance between Mische and Asar is a slow burn of the highest order. Broadbent writes their dynamic with extraordinary care, letting the bond between them build through shared hardship and small, hard-won trusts before it becomes something neither of them can survive without. The next book of the duology is The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk, which you would want to pick up right after.
4. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (The Empyrean Series, #1)
20-year-old Violet Sorrengail has spent her whole life preparing to become a scribe. Then her mother, the commanding general of Navarre's war college, overrules every plan Violet ever made and forces her into the most dangerous quadrant of all: the dragon riders. The training program is brutal and deliberately lethal. Dragons bond with riders or incinerate them on the spot. Most cadets do not survive their first year. Violet's body is fragile, and her competitors would happily kill her to improve their own odds, and the most powerful wingleader in the program, Xaden Riorson, has every reason to want her specifically dead.
What follows is one of the most addictive settings in recent romantasy. A dark academic war college where magic manifests as elemental signet powers, the war raging outside the kingdom's borders is far more complicated than anyone is admitting and the enemies-to-lovers tension between Violet and Xaden is exactly the kind that makes sleep feel optional. The world-building is intricate and layered with secrets that compound with every chapter and the dragons themselves are characters in their own right.
Fourth Wing spent 18 weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and became one of the defining books of the current romantasy wave. A TV adaptation is now in officially in the works at Prime Video.
5. The Cruel Prince by Holly Black (The Folk of the Air, #1)
Jude Duarte was seven years old when a fae general named Madoc murdered her parents and took her and her sisters to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. A decade on, Jude has grown up surrounded by beings who despise her mortality and a court that views humans as entertainment at best, prey at worst. She wants a real place in this world, and she is willing to scheme, lie, and fight her way toward it.
Standing between her and everything she wants is Prince Cardan, the cruelest and most beautiful of all the royal fae, whose hostility toward Jude feels oddly personal. As she is drawn deeper into palace conspiracies and a power struggle that could tear Elfhame apart, the bitter rivalry between Jude and Cardan curls into something far more complicated than either of them can afford to name.
The court politics are sharp and layered. Jude is one of the great heroines of the genre, and the enemies-to-lovers arc across the full trilogy is the slow-burning, devastating kind that lives in your head long after the final page.
6. When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker (The Moonfall Series, #1)
In this world, dragons, when they pass, drift skyward and become moons. And sometimes, those moons fall, and the destruction is catastrophic. Raeve is an assassin working for the rebellion. When her world is shattered and she is taken prisoner, she is rescued by King Kaan, who looks at her as though he has been searching for her across lifetimes. He is convinced, with a certainty that borders on frightening, that she is the reincarnation of his lost love, the woman whose death broke him and set an ancient prophecy in motion.
Raeve has no memory of any of it. What unfolds is a love story told across two interleaved timelines that slowly pieces together the truth of who she was, who she is now, and what the two of them might mean to the survival of the world. Parker's prose is lyrical and emotionally generous, and the book was designed to break your heart before it heals it. The atmospheric world-building, with its fallen dragon-moons and elemental magic, feels genuinely original in a genre that can sometimes lean on familiar architecture.
7. This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi (Woven Kingdom, #1)
To all the world, Alizeh is a disposable servant girl with ice in her veins and eyes she keeps carefully lowered. What no one knows is that she is the long-lost heir to an ancient Jinn kingdom, hiding in plain sight while the empire above her crumbles toward a reckoning she has been told, her whole life, that she is destined to face. The Jinn have lived under the thumb of the human empire for generations, stripped of their powers and reduced to servants and soldiers. Alizeh endures it with a patience that borders on preternatural, knowing that her survival depends on remaining invisible.
Invisibility becomes impossible when she catches the attention of Crown Prince Kamran, who notices her first with suspicion, then with something he cannot name. His prophecy warns that a Jinn will be the ruin of his kingdom, and everything about Alizeh suggests she is that woman. He should want her destroyed. He finds he wants nothing of the sort.
Set in a world drawn from Persian mythology and the epic poem the Shahnameh, this is a romantasy that stands completely apart from everything else in the genre. Tahereh Mafi's prose is among the most exquisitely crafted in contemporary fantasy; the world feels genuinely alive and unlike any Western court fantasy, and the slow-burning forbidden romance between Alizeh and Kamran is the kind that makes your chest ache. A love triangle that develops across the series has divided readers in the best possible way.
8. These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong (These Violent Delights Duet, #1)
Shanghai, 1926. The city hums with debauchery and runs red with the blood feud between two rival gangs. The Scarlet Gang, who are Chinese, and the White Flowers, who are Russian. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, returned from years abroad to claim her place as heir to the Scarlet Gang and to deal with the unhealed wound of Roma Montagov, heir to the White Flowers, her first love and her first real betrayal.
Before Juliette can settle any old scores, something far worse appears. Members of both gangs are killing themselves in horrifying ways, clawing at their own throats. A monster has awakened and is spreading a contagion that neither gang knows how to fight. Stopping it will require Juliette and Roma to work together, which means trusting the one person in the world she has sworn never to trust again.
Inspired by Romeo and Juliet but entirely its own creation, this book brings 1920s Shanghai to life with extraordinary richness and atmosphere. The exes-to-reluctant-allies romance is bitter, charged, and aching in exactly the right ways, and the world-building carries real historical and political weight beneath all the supernatural chaos. Chloe Gong was just 22 years old when it became a New York Times bestseller.
9. The Prison Healer by Lynette Noni (The Prison Healer, #1)
17-year-old Kiva Meridan has survived ten years in Zalindov, the most notorious death prison in the kingdom, by keeping her head down, making herself useful and refusing to let anything touch her. Her role as the prison healer has bought her a fragile measure of protection, but every day in Zalindov is a gamble with survival.
When the legendary Rebel Queen is captured and brought to Zalindov, deathly ill and barely able to stand, Kiva is ordered to keep her alive long enough to face the Trial by Ordeal: a gauntlet of elemental challenges that no one has ever survived. Then a coded message arrives from Kiva's family: Don't let her die. We are coming. Knowing the trials will kill the queen in her condition, Kiva volunteers to compete in her place.
What follows is a gripping survival story layered with political intrigue and a slow-building romance with a new inmate who is far more than he appears. The found family that quietly forms inside Zalindov is one of the most emotionally devastating in modern YA fantasy, and the twist that closes the first book is the kind that makes you immediately reach for the sequel.
10. Gild by Raven Kennedy (The Plated Prisoner, #1)
Auren is made of gold. Her skin, her hair, her trailing ribbons—all of it touched by the power of King Midas, the man who rescued her from the slums and placed her on the highest pedestal in his frozen castle. She has spent ten years in a gilded cage, telling herself that the restrictions are protection, that the solitude is safety, that everything Midas does comes from love.
When Midas makes a decision that pulls Auren out of her cage and into the wider world, the story she has been telling herself begins to crack. The king she trusted reveals himself to be something more complicated and more frightening than she ever allowed herself to see. The world outside is brutal and full of people who see her entirely differently than Midas does, including a man named Rip, whose unsettling presence she cannot explain or dismiss.
A dark reimagining of the King Midas myth, this series is slower to start than most romantasy and deliberately so. The emotional payoff across the full six-book series is extraordinary, and Auren's journey from gilded prisoner to someone who reclaims her own power is one of the most cathartic arcs the genre has produced.
11. Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass, #1)
Before ACOTAR, there was Celaena Sardothien, the character who first proved that Maas was capable of something extraordinary. At 18, Celaena is already considered the most feared assassin in the kingdom of Adarlan, and she has spent the last year slowly dying in the brutal salt mines of Endovier. When the Crown Prince arrives with an offer to compete in a tournament to become the King's Champion and earn her eventual freedom, Celaena accepts, knowing the competition is designed to be lethal and not particularly caring.
Throne of Glass runs eight books and transforms dramatically in scope and ambition as it goes on. What begins as court intrigue slowly becomes something epic in every sense of the word. Celaena's arc across the full series is one of the most ambitious character journeys in contemporary fantasy, and many readers who discover Maas through ACOTAR find they love this world even more.
12. Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas (Crescent City, #1)
Bryce Quinlan is half-human, half-fae, and she lives in Crescent City, a world where ancient magic and modern life share the same streets, where angels and fae live in apartment buildings alongside humans, and where the worst night of Bryce's life happened two years ago and still hasn't let her go. Her best friend was murdered by a demon. Bryce survived. She has spent the time since working, drinking, and refusing to look directly at any of it.
When a new string of murders begins to echo that night, Bryce finds herself pulled into the investigation alongside Hunt Athalar, a fallen angel turned assassin with his own reasons for being dangerous. The mystery is intricate and slow-building, the world is genuinely unlike anything else Maas has written, and the romance between Bryce and Hunt is one of her finest. For readers who want more from Maas herself, this is the natural and deeply satisfying next step.
13. Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard (Red Queen, #1)
Mare Barrow has grown up Red in a world divided by blood. The Silvers are the ruling elite. Silver-blooded, possessed of extraordinary abilities, and completely indifferent to the suffering of the Reds beneath them. The Reds are soldiers, servants, and cannon fodder, and Mare has spent her life picking pockets to keep her family from starving. Then something impossible happens. In front of the entire Silver court, in the arena built for their entertainment, Mare discovers she has a power of her own, and she is Red.
The Silvers, terrified of what this means, hide her in plain sight, giving her a false identity as a long-lost Silver noble and betrothing her to the second prince. From inside the palace, Mare begins feeding information to the Red rebel movement, walking a tightrope between survival and revolution while navigating tangled feelings for both princes and learning, too late, that in the Silver court, betrayal is simply the cost of ambition.
Fast-paced, dramatically plotted, and built around a twist that genuinely reshuffles everything, Red Queen earns its enormous readership.
14. Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan (Celestial Kingdom, #1)
Xingyin has grown up in secret on the moon, the hidden daughter of the goddess Chang'e, who was exiled there as punishment for stealing the elixir of immortality. When Xingyin's existence is discovered and her mother's fragile safety is threatened, she is forced to flee, tumbling away from the moon and into the vast, dangerous world of the Celestial Kingdom below. To survive, she conceals her identity, joins the imperial army, and trains as a warrior alongside the Crown Prince and his companions.
What comes next is a sweeping epic drawn from Chinese mythology, structured around a series of legendary trials and quests that echo the classic tales of Hou Yi and Chang'e. The romance is deeply felt and tender without ever losing sight of the larger story, and Tan writes with a warmth and emotional generosity that makes the quieter moments land with as much power as the battles. This is a romantasy that earns its epicness through character, and it stands as one of the most genuinely beautiful books the genre has produced.
15. From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout (Blood and Ash, #1)
Poppy has been chosen since birth. As the Maiden of the kingdom of Solis, every aspect of her life has been decided by others. She must never be touched, never truly seen, and never make a decision for herself. She is meant to ascend and serve the gods, and the closer that day draws, the more apprehensive she becomes about what it will actually cost her.
Everything changes when she meets Hawke Flynn, a guard assigned to protect her. The slow-burn between them is the suffocating kind. When Hawke's real identity is finally revealed, it pulls the ground from beneath everything Poppy thought she knew about her world and the people who have been orchestrating her life from the beginning.
Fast-paced, immersive, and built on a mythology that expands impressively with each book, this won the Goodreads Choice Award for Romance in 2020 and is now one of the defining series of modern romantasy. An Amazon Studios TV adaptation is currently in development.
If you love A Court of Thorns and Roses, you can't go wrong with these 15 books!
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