Adalyn Grace, the #1 New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author behind the Belladonna trilogy and the All the Stars and Teeth duology, has made her adult fiction debut with The Wretched Divine, and it is a phenomenal leap forward in every sense. This is Grace writing bigger, darker and with considerably more complexity than anything she has attempted before.
The Wretched Divine hit shelves on September 22, 2026, from Feiwel and Friends in the United States and Gollancz in the United Kingdom. It is easily one of the best fantasy reads of the year.
I came into The Wretched Divine already familiar with how Grace constructs fantasy, romance and tension, and the kind of ending that stays with you for days. What I was not fully prepared for was how much further she would push here. The world in The Wretched Divine is darker, the stakes are heavier and the moral complexity is of a different order entirely than anything in her previous work. It took me by surprise in the best way.
A knight, an angel and a demon walk into a war
The story follows Aurelie Chantelune, a knight in a kingdom that has been at war with demons for as long as anyone can remember. She is fighting because the demons took her family, and because she carries the Chantelune bloodline, which means that when she claims her first kill, she inherits a soulbond with Yuriel, an angel whose power has long been vital to her kingdom's survival.
When the people Aurelie loves begin turning into the very creatures she has spent her life hunting, she is pushed into a decision that goes against everything she was raised to believe.
Aurelie forges a second bond, this one with Severin, a demon she has no reason to trust who claims he knows how to end the war permanently. What follows is the three of them hunting for a cure, the bonds between them deepening in ways none of them intended, and Aurelie slowly beginning to question the war itself.
The worldbuilding is meticulous and the characters even more so
Yuriel did not choose to be bonded to a human and makes no effort to pretend he is pleased about it. He is guarded, somewhat cold, and considerably more interesting for it. His backstory reframes a lot of what reads initially as aloofness into something much sadder. By the end I had considerably more feelings about him than I expected to going in.
Severin is the obvious reader favourite and Grace knows it. He is funny in a way that reads as deliberate armor. He has learned to make light of things because the alternative is too heavy.
Grace has said in an exclusive interview with Winter Is Coming that his humor was always in the character from the start and that he is very aware of how short life can be. That comes through on every page where he appears.
Aurelie takes longer to come into focus, which is the one place the book asks for patience it does not immediately reward. In the first half she is more defined by loss and duty than by who she actually is. The second half corrects this decisively. By the end she is fully her own person and the wait feels worth it, but it is a slow build and worth knowing that going in.
The soulbond mechanic is very thoroughly constructed, creating the right amount of intimacy and complication. The world is dark without being gratuitous. The war feels ancient and costly in the way the best fantasy conflicts do.
And the last quarter of this book is something else. I was not prepared for how hard it lands. The reveals are earned, the cliffhanger is both surprising and, in retrospect, completely inevitable, and the ending left me sitting with the book closed for a few minutes just processing. Grace has always been good at endings. This one is her best.
Verdict
The Wretched Divine earns its length, its darkness and its ending. The first half asks for patience. The second half makes that patience feel entirely well spent. Severin alone is worth the price of admission, and Aurelie, once she comes fully into herself, is someone you will not want to leave.
What distinguishes The Wretched Divine from Grace's earlier work is that the emotional core here is genuinely more complicated. There are no clean sides. Aurelie's certainties erode slowly and honestly, and Grace does not offer easy resolutions. For readers who loved the Belladonna books but wanted something with more weight and moral ambiguity to it, this is exactly that and more.
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
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