Amélie Wen Zhao Books

Amélie Wen Zhao writes fantasy shaped by three cities. Born in Paris, raised in Beijing, and now living in New York where she has worked in finance while writing novels on the side, she brings a genuinely international sensibility to a genre that often recycles the same medieval Europe. Her worlds draw deeply on Chinese mythology, cultivation traditions, and the experience of living between cultures, and she has become one of the key authors pulling romantasy eastward.

Her career started with a storm. Blood Heir, her 2019 debut about a princess with blood magic in a Russian-inspired empire, became the center of an online controversy before it even published, and Zhao briefly pulled the book before revising and releasing it that November. The episode became a case study in pre-publication pile-ons, and the trilogy that followed, completed by Red Tigress in 2021 and Crimson Reign in 2022, found its audience anyway. Whatever you think of that saga, it says something about her resilience that she kept publishing at all, let alone at this pace.

The Song of the Last Kingdom duology is where her voice fully arrived. Song of Silver, Flame Like Night follows Lan, a song girl in an occupied land, and Zen, a practitioner of forbidden magic, as they work to recover the crushed legacy of the Last Kingdom. It is a wuxia-flavored epic about colonization, memory, and power's price, with a slow-building romance threaded through. Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White completed the duology in 2024. These are young adult books, and the heat stays low; the yearning does the work.

Her adult debut is the one romantasy readers keep recommending to each other. The Scorpion and the Night Blossom, published in 2025, opened the Three Realms duology and hit the New York Times bestseller list. It follows a mortal cultivator who enters brutal immortality trials to save her family and finds herself drawn to a dangerous half-demon, which puts it squarely in forbidden love territory with a much sharper edge than her YA. The Dragon and the Sun Lotus followed in 2026 to finish the story. This duology carries real heat compared to her earlier work, moving her up our spice scale into properly adult territory, though she still leans tension-first rather than scene-after-scene.

What defines Zhao at her best is texture. Her magic systems feel ancient rather than invented last Tuesday, her food and clothing and music are specific, and her villains believe things rather than just wanting power. Her weaknesses are pacing related: middles that sag under worldbuilding, and plot beats that seasoned fantasy readers will call early. Her prose has also divided readers, lush to some, overwrought to others. If you loved the density of The Poppy War but wanted more romance and less despair, she hits a sweet spot almost nobody else occupies.

She also matters as a signal of where the genre is heading. The pipeline of authors moving from YA fantasy into adult romantasy has produced many of the category's current bestsellers, and Zhao's leap with the Three Realms duology is one of the cleaner examples: same mythic material, same lush instincts, but aged up in stakes, violence, and romance until it fits the adult shelf naturally. Readers who followed her across that jump got to watch an author grow in real time, which is its own kind of reading pleasure.

Where to start depends on your shelf. Adult romantasy readers should go straight to The Scorpion and the Night Blossom, easily her most bingeable book and a natural next read for fans of demon princes and deadly trials. YA-comfortable readers can start with Song of Silver, Flame Like Night for the richer, slower epic. Blood Heir is best saved for completionists. Check our enemies-to-lovers fantasy shelf for what to read when you finish, because her trial-romance structure has plenty of cousins there.