Books Like Throne Of Glass

Raeve is a Made assassin, reborn from fire with no memory of her past lives, working as a lethal mercenary in a rebellion against a ruthless crown, right up until she’s captured by the very king she’s spent her life fighting. The assassin skill set, the hidden history slowly surfacing, the sheer competence of her, it’s all deeply Celaena-coded, just wrapped in a world where the moons hatch dragons.

Then there is Kaan Vaegor, the dragon-riding king who seems to know Raeve in a way she can’t explain and can’t forgive. The past-life ache between them, the sense that they’ve loved and lost each other before, gives the slow burn a devastating weight.

Spice Level: Warm | Tropes: Romantasy, assassin heroine, dragons, hidden past, second-chance/past-life romance, enemies to lovers

Tisaanah escapes a life of enslavement and crosses an ocean to train as a magic-wielding warrior, determined to earn the power she needs to go back and free everyone she left behind. That relentless drive, that refusal to be a victim, is the exact backbone that makes a Throne of Glass heroine so addictive.

Her reluctant teacher is Maxantarius, a scarred, self-exiled former war mage who wants nothing to do with the world’s fighting anymore, and the slow thaw between student and mentor is beautifully done. It’s a story about power, cost and the people worth burning for, from an author who has since become a romantasy powerhouse.

Spice Level: Warm | Tropes: Romantasy, enslaved-to-powerful heroine, mentor romance, slow burn, war, found family

If the part of Celaena you loved most was the trained-assassin competence and the loyalty tug between duty and the heart, this delivers a heroine playing a very long, very dangerous game. Lara has been raised since childhood as a weapon and a spy, then married off to the king of the kingdom she was born to destroy, sent in to find the weakness that will bring it down. The catch is that the enemy she was taught to hate is nothing like the monster in the stories.

Watching Lara’s certainty crack as her loyalty to home wars with what she actually sees is exactly the kind of slow moral unravelling that makes this genre sing, and Aren is a genuinely good, genuinely formidable king to fall for.

Spice Level: Warm | Tropes: Fantasy romance, warrior heroine, marriage of convenience, enemies to lovers, spy heroine, political intrigue

Laia is a Scholar slave who becomes a spy for the resistance to save her imprisoned brother, and Elias is one of the empire’s finest soldiers, secretly desperate to escape the very academy that forged him into a weapon. Blackcliff, where students are trained into elite Masks, has all the deadly-institution dread that made the King’s Champion competition so tense.

Told in dual point of view, it’s dark, propulsive and morally complicated, with stakes that never let up. The romance is a slow, aching thing that takes a back seat to survival, which is exactly the balance Throne of Glass readers are used to.

Spice Level: Sweet | Tropes: Fantasy, military academy, slave-turned-spy heroine, dual POV, slow burn, brutal empire

Paige Mahoney is a rare and dangerous kind of clairvoyant working in the criminal underworld of a dystopian, alternate London, until she’s captured and taken to a secret city ruled by an otherworldly race who intend to use her gift. The worldbuilding is intricate and demanding in the best way, the kind you sink into slowly and then can’t climb out of.

Her fraught, slow-burning tie to Warden, her enigmatic and powerful keeper, has that forbidden, wary quality that pays off across the series rather than all at once. It’s planned as a seven book saga, so if what you need is something enormous to disappear into, this is a very safe place to lose the next few months.

Spice Level: Sweet | Tropes: Dystopian fantasy, clairvoyance, captive-and-captor, slow burn, epic worldbuilding, forbidden love

For readers who loved the rebellion, the hidden power and the political machinery of the later Throne of Glass books, this is a gorgeous obsession waiting to happen. Diem lives in a world split between ordinary mortals and the Descended, the god-blooded ruling class, and when she’s dragged into the heart of a brewing rebellion she starts to realise her own power is far more dangerous than anyone guessed. The class conflict and simmering revolution give it real epic-fantasy weight.

The enemies-to-lovers thread with the infuriating, magnetic Prince Luther is the kind that has readers screaming into group chats, and the series is built for the long haul. It’s on Kindle Unlimited, which makes committing to the Kindred’s Curse saga wonderfully low risk.

Spice Level: Warm | Tropes: Romantasy, hidden powers, rebellion, enemies to lovers, class conflict, slow burn

Scarlett Monrhoe and her two sisters were raised from childhood by a ruthless Assassin Lord and trained to torture and kill, until they became the most feared trio on the continent. After a devastating night leaves Scarlett caged in a noble’s household to be brought to heel, she’s finally handed a job with the one payment she’s coveted for ten years: revenge against the Fire Fae Prince who murdered her mother.

Then children start vanishing from her home, and everything is put on hold as Scarlett races to save the most innocent, uncovering forgotten secrets and a darkness that stretches far beyond her own kingdom. Told in dual point of view and openly compared to Sarah J. Maas, it has the assassin heroine, the fae, the slow-burn enemies-to-lovers pull and the buried-past ache that Throne of Glass readers crave.

Spice Level: Sweet | Tropes: Assassin fmc, vampires, enemies to lovers, found family

Silla Nordvig is running for her life after the queen of Íseldur has warriors sent to drag her to her death, and her murdered father’s last words set her on a single perilous quest: survive the Road of Bones, a thousand-mile stretch haunted by warbands, creatures of darkness and a mysterious murderer, and reach the safety of a shield-house in Kopa. Desperate and out of options, she stows away in the supply wagon of the notorious Bloodaxe Crew.

To make it to Kopa alive she has to win over Rey, the brooding leader of the crew known as Axe Eyes, while trying very hard not to fall for the Wolf, his distractingly handsome right-hand man, all with the queen’s obsessive assassin closing in and a much bigger secret of her own to keep hidden.

Spice Level: Warm | Tropes: Nordic Inspired, vikings, forbidden love, secrets

Leina has spent a lifetime submitting, until soldiers come to drag her brother off to the mines and divine fury erupts out of her, leaving a scythe and a pile of bodies in its wake. She expects execution. Instead she’s claimed by a goddess and thrown into a world of winged warhorses, warring gods and cursed monsters, conscripted to fight for a kingdom that enslaved her people and gods she doesn’t believe in.

The one ordered to keep her in line is Ryot, the god-sworn warrior assigned to train her, all duty and discipline against her fire, and the forbidden, he-falls-first slow burn between mentor and reluctant recruit is the beating heart of the book.

Spice Level: Warm | Tropes: Forbidden love, trials, feminine rage, he falls first

Still reeling from the mysterious deaths of her father and brother, Ary Gold is surviving on sheer will in the icy wilds of the North, until strangers arrive with tales of long-lost magic and royal blood running in her veins. The realm of Nyrida is under threat from an ancient shadow wielder bent on drowning the world in corrupted darkness, and Ary is the only one who can stop him.

To stand a chance she’s meant to marry the commander she’s been promised to, whose army is the kingdom’s best hope in the coming war, and train to fight, but her fiercest challenge isn’t on the battlefield. The man assigned to forge her into a warrior is cloaked in violence and secrets, cold, arrogant and maddeningly unreadable.

Spice Level: Warm | Tropes: Forced proximity, one bed, found family, slow burn