This year marks 15 years since the release of The Wise Man's Fear, the second book in The Kingkiller Chronicle fantasy series by Patrick Rothfuss. Beginning with 2007's The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss' books were a massive hit with readers, creating a huge fandom that was eager for more. However, after a decade and a half wait for the third and final book in the trilogy, The Doors of Stone, the series is now often spoke of in the same breath as George R.R. Martin's The Winds of Winter, for long-running books that fans have been waiting on for so long they're starting to give up hope of ever seeing them.
As someone who's been in the unfortunate category of whiling away the years for both The Winds of Winter and The Doors of Stone for their entire respective waits, I'm all too familiar with the periodic impulse check to see if there's been any news. So let's take stock of the latest updates for The Doors of Stone.
Does The Doors of Stone have a release date yet?
Let's start with the most important question: has Patrick Rothfuss finished The Doors of Stone yet? Despite sharing a photo of a finished manuscript draft of the book on social media all the way back in 2013, the work remains ongoing for Rothfuss and The Doors of Stone. One can assume much if not all of that draft has been deeply reworked in the intervening 13 years. The book does not have a release date, and Rothfuss has not stated it's done. In fact, it's been long enough since his last update that there's never been more ambiguity about where the book stands.
When were Patrick Rothfuss' last updates about The Doors of Stone?
If you want to read a full oral history of Patrick Rothfuss' rocky journey with The Doors of Stone, extending from The Wise Man's Fear to the announcement of his latest novella, The Narrow Road Between Desires, go here. For this piece, we're going to focus primarily on everything from The Narrow Road's publication onward.
The last time Rothfuss had any sort of prominent presence online is late 2023, when he released the novella The Narrow Road Between Desires. This shorter work set in the Kingkiller Chronicle world was a revised and expanded version of his novella The Lightning Tree, which originally appeared in a 2014 anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois titled Rogues. The new version was released as a standalone book from DAW, similar to the treatment of The Slow Regard of Silent Things.
At that time, Rothfuss did offer a few small updates that made it clear he was still working on book 3, including in our own exclusive interview with him, where he touched on how the invention of the Embril magic system for the novella gave him another tool to play with in book 3. But since then, it's been crickets. No real updates about the novel, and no updates about the missing charity chapter debacle — which is substantial enough to warrant its own discussion — beyond saying in a live-stream a month before the release of The Narrow Road that he feels bad about not delivering it. The last blog post on his website is dated November 26, 2023, which coincided with a promotional push for The Narrow Road Between Desires.
The only other mention we've for The Doors of Stone since the release of The Narrow Road Between Desires happened in early June 2025, when Rothfuss did an event with author Joe Abercrombie as part of the latter's tour for his new book The Devils. Abercrombie did several multi-city tours across the UK and U.S. where he was in conversation with other authors, and at Naperville, Illinois, it was Rothfuss who entertained the crowd with him.
This event understandably focused on Abercrombie's new release, which is what the tour was all about. But fans who were there quickly reported on what they'd heart at the event to the rest of the fandom via Reddit, and it's there that we heard second hand that Rothfuss dropped a brief quip about his "bloated, unpublishable" manuscript for The Doors of Stone. That's not much to go on — really, it's basically nothing — but it does tell us that he was still working on the book as recently as mid-2025.
Rothfuss has been open in the past about some of the struggles in his personal life, and how those have delayed the release of The Doors of Stone. Since he's been almost radio silent for nearly three years, we can't speak to how things stand now, but for my part, I hope that he's taken this period of relative quiet to spend time just finding a way to enjoy the art of it all again. I'm firmly of the belief that we won't get The Doors of Stone until that happens. In the meantime, there are fortunately plenty of other incredible fantasy book series to enjoy.
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