A.K. Larkwood Books

A.K. Larkwood studied English at St John's College, Cambridge, worked in higher education and media relations, and later returned to study law. She lives in Oxford with her wife and a cat. Her debut, The Unspoken Name, arrived in 2020 and was one of the more discussed fantasy debuts of that year, largely because it did something the genre rarely does well: it started with a premise most books would spend a full novel building to, and then moved past it in the opening act.

Csorwe is an Oshaaru orc raised as the chosen bride of the Unspoken God, meaning she has a fixed date on which she will walk into a cave and die. On that day, a wizard named Sethennai offers her an alternative. She takes it, and becomes his sword: an assassin and agent searching across worlds for a missing artifact that will restore his position. The book then covers years, jumps between planes through a network of maze-like gates, and gradually turns into a story about what it costs to owe your entire existence to someone. The sequel, The Thousand Eyes, published in 2022, closes the story. It is a duology, not an ongoing series, and readers should know that the ending is a real ending.

What defines Larkwood's writing is tonal control. The books are funny in a dry, understated way that sits comfortably next to genuine horror, and the prose is unshowy but precise. Her worldbuilding is generous without being explanatory: gates between dead worlds, gods who feed on their worshippers, and a magic system with a real and unpleasant price. The relationship at the center is between two women, written with the same unfussed matter-of-factness Larkwood applies to everything else, and the portal fantasy structure lets her change setting whenever the story needs new pressure. She is also unusually willing to skip time. Years pass between sections, characters change offscreen, and the reader is trusted to catch up. That choice makes the duology feel much larger than its page count, and it is a large part of why the debut got the attention it did.

On heat, expect very little. The Serpent Gates books sit at roughly 1 on our book spice ratings. The romance is real, central to the emotional arc, and almost entirely off-page in physical terms. Readers arriving from Fourth Wing or the more explicit end of romantasy will find the balance surprising, because Larkwood is writing epic fantasy that happens to contain a love story rather than fantasy romance in the current commercial sense. Content warnings are worth noting: the books deal with cults, coerced obedience, body horror, and a manipulative mentor relationship treated with clear eyes.

For a romantasy audience, Larkwood is genre ancestry adjacent to the present moment rather than part of it. She is the right recommendation for a reader who wants queer fantasy with real teeth, a heroine who is genuinely dangerous, and worldbuilding that rewards attention. She also demonstrates something worth internalizing: a relationship can carry enormous weight in a book that never once goes explicit. Readers who like morally gray figures will find Sethennai one of the better versions of that character type, mostly because the narrative never asks you to forgive him.

Where to start: The Unspoken Name first, obviously, then The Thousand Eyes. The two books are structurally different from each other, and the second takes risks with point of view and timeline that will land better if the first has already earned your trust. There is nothing else in the series and no companion novels, so it is a clean two-book commitment. If you want to keep going in that direction afterward, look toward queer epic fantasy rather than the romance-forward shelves.