A Court of Thorns and Roses Reading Order: All 7 Books in Order

A Court of Thorns and Roses started life in 2015 as a Beauty and the Beast retelling with fae courts and a huntress heroine, and for a few years it simply sold well. Then lockdown-era BookTok found it and turned it into a phenomenon. Sarah J. Maas is now one of the bestselling fantasy authors alive, and ACOTAR is the series most new romantasy readers meet first. It is the closest thing the genre has to a shared canon: the court aesthetics, the mate bond discourse, the endless fan-cast videos, all of it traces back here.

Reading order is publication order, no exceptions. A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015), A Court of Mist and Fury (2016), A Court of Wings and Ruin (2017), the holiday novella A Court of Frost and Starlight (2018), then A Court of Silver Flames (2021), which hands the lead to Feyre's sister Nesta. Order matters more here than in most series because Mist and Fury deliberately rewrites how you read book one, and going in blind to that reversal is half the experience. Frost and Starlight is skippable on plot but it seeds Silver Flames, so at least skim it. The long wait is finally over: Maas announced on Call Her Daddy that book six arrives October 27, 2026, book seven follows January 12, 2027, and an eighth is still being written. She wrote one enormous story, well over a thousand pages, and split it into parts.

Heat climbs as you go. Book one sits around 2 on our spice scale, Mist and Fury is a solid 3, and Silver Flames is a 4 with the most explicit scenes Maas has written. Content notes worth knowing before you start: sexual coercion and assault in the Under the Mountain chapters, an emotionally abusive relationship shown on the page before the story names it as one, extended PTSD depiction, self-harm ideation in Silver Flames, and plenty of war violence and grief.

What makes the series work is the found family. The Inner Circle banter carries entire chapters, Feyre's trauma recovery in Mist and Fury is genuinely well handled, and Nesta's book is a raw, angry portrait of self-loathing that a lot of readers consider the best thing Maas has written. Fair criticism: book one is the slowest and weakest, the Tamlin pivot between books reads to some as a retcon rather than a reveal, Frost and Starlight is filler, and the fandom's war over Elain's endgame has become its own weather system. On screen news, the Hulu adaptation died in development after years of waiting, and Maas confirmed in early 2026 that she has her screen rights back with no immediate plans.

If you finish and want more Maas, Throne of Glass is the bigger, longer epic and is already complete. If it was the heat and the bite you liked, From Blood and Ash runs hotter and Quicksilver hotter still. And if the mate bond was the hook, our fated mates and enemies to lovers trope pages are full of books that chase that exact feeling.