AJ Lancaster Books

A.J. Lancaster writes from New Zealand, in a house she shares with two ridiculous cats and an unreasonable number of plants, and she has quietly become one of the most recommended authors in the cosy end of fantasy romance. She built the Stariel books independently, and Tor UK subsequently acquired the series for the UK and Commonwealth outside Canada, which is the kind of pickup that only happens when a self-published series has demonstrated it can sell without a marketing push behind it.

Stariel is a gaslamp fantasy, meaning roughly Edwardian technology and social structure with magic layered underneath. Motor cars exist. So do telegrams, land inheritance disputes, and a rigid set of rules about who may be seen with whom. The premise is that fae are a story people tell until abruptly they are not. The Lord of Stariel opens with the death of the estate's lord and the magical selection of a successor, and the estate chooses Hetta Valstar, the daughter who left to become a stage magician in the city and has no interest whatsoever in coming home. She comes home anyway, inherits a failing estate and a family that disapproves of her, and finds that the estate's land magic is bound up with something older and less friendly than anyone had assumed.

What defines the writing is tone control. Lancaster's own description of the series is fantasy with strong doses of family drama and romance, served with a side of mystery and garnished with statistically improbable quantities of attractive people, and that self-aware lightness is exactly right. The books are warm without being weightless. The stakes escalate genuinely across the quartet, but the register stays comfortable, and there is always a scene of people arguing over dinner. Her fae are the older, colder kind, closer to folklore than to court romance, which gives the fae material real teeth when it surfaces.

The series proper is a quartet: The Lord of Stariel, The Prince of Secrets, The Court of Mortals, and The King of Faerie. A fifth book, A Rake of His Own, was written after the quartet concluded, follows a side character, and is both sillier and noticeably raunchier than the main sequence. Read the quartet first. The romance between Hetta and Wyn is a genuine slow burn, constrained by class, secrecy and obligation rather than by manufactured misunderstanding, and it takes multiple books to resolve. That patience is the series' great strength and the most common complaint from readers who wanted it settled sooner.

Heat level: the main quartet sits at 1 to 2 on our spice scale. There is longing, there is tension, there are a few scenes that close the door at the right moment. A Rake of His Own is a step up, closer to a 3. Nothing in the series is explicit by current genre standards, so if you are looking for the Fourth Wing end of the market this will read as restrained. If you are looking for something you could hand to a relative, this is one of the safest recommendations in the genre.

Why she matters to romantasy readers: Stariel is the standard answer to two very common requests. The first is cosy fantasy romance with an actual plot, for readers who liked the warmth of Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes but want more happening. The second is fae done in a historical register rather than a courtly-immortal one, for readers who have finished the obvious fae series and want something with a different texture. The found family thread running through the Valstar siblings is also unusually well handled, because the family already exists and has to be repaired rather than assembled.

Where to start: The Lord of Stariel, in order, all four books, then A Rake of His Own if you want more. Book one is the shortest and most contained of the quartet and works as a fair test of whether the tone suits you. If you finish and want more gaslamp fae, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries is the closest neighbour on the shelf.