When The Spicy Librarian, a romance bookshop in Leamington Spa, announced a masquerade ball to celebrate the new Sarah J Maas novel, 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets. “We sold out within 13 minutes,” says the shop’s co-founder Ali Maynard James. “As soon as tickets went on sale, our website crashed”.
The shop was one of many across the UK marking the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, the first instalment of Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series in more than five years. On Monday night, bookshops threw parties and opened past midnight – and The Spicy Librarian hired a stately home to mark the occasion.
The book, the sixth in the series known to fans as Acotar, went on sale at 12.01am on Tuesday. Few releases carry as much commercial weight – the first book, a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast, was published in 2015, with later books following the adventures of Feyre across the faerie lands of Prythian. By 2021 the series had sold 13m copies, and across her three interlinked fantasy series, Maas has now sold more than 75 m books in 40 languages.
The Spicy Librarian, which bills itself as Europe’s largest independent romance bookshop, held its ball at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, where riders dressed as “fae warriors” carried torches on horseback. Tickets were £149 – the shop ran the event again the following night, which also sold out, and ordered about 750 copies to cover both balls and its pre-orders.
“We gave everyone the books at midnight, and people started reading them immediately,” says Maynard James. “Some people stayed up and devoured the whole thing in a few hours.”
Maas is the biggest name in romantasy, a genre combining fantasy and romance which has grown from an online niche into one of publishing’s most lucrative categories. Last year, Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros – another romantasy star – had the biggest first week for a hardback novel in the UK since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 2015. In 2024, booming sales of romance and fantasy helped push UK fiction revenue above £1bn for the first time. The genre’s readers are largely young women, and much of its growth has played out on TikTok.
“It’s been such a long wait for this book, people are just itching to get their hands on it,” says Starlin Marot, owner of Bad Girl Books in Oxford, the UK’s first romantasy-only bookshop. “For so many of us, the series has been like a gateway drug into the genre, or into reading itself.”
In Oxford, Marot had only planned to open Bad Girl Books for half an hour after midnight, for a couple of readers who had asked on Instagram. Instead, a queue formed outside. “It was just crazy, like a flurry of people came in,” she says. “I was honestly not expecting that many people just for half an hour. But it shows how popular these books are!”
Her midnight release doubled as a pyjama party. “It was cute and cosy vibes,” Marot says. “We had Acotar-themed cakes and drinks.”
In London, romance bookshop Main Character Books decided against a midnight opening, serving breakfast to readers collecting pre-orders instead and holding an evening party for 45 people. “We decorated the entire store,” says owner Cassie Simmons. “In early October we had more pre-orders than we expected … we doubled our order at the publisher.” After Tuesday’s sales, the shop ordered again. “We’re going through stock even faster than we expected.”
The latest book is the first part of a four-part story. A Court of Forgotten Melody, out on 12 January, contains the next two parts, and the last is still being written.
“I think it’s definitely the five-year wait and the hype that’s been going up online,” says Simmons.
Maynard James, who says Acotar got her reading for pleasure again after becoming a mother, believes its heroines are a big part of the draw for its largely female fanbase. “They aren’t women that are damsels in distress that need rescuing or saving,” she says. “They almost prioritise themselves before they prioritise love. We want the women to be the centre of their own story.”
For the specialist shops, the boom is showing up in the till. “Sales are so much higher than I even anticipated for the year already,” says Marot. “It’s so exciting.”
While a Hulu adaptation of Acotar was announced in 2021, Maas has now bought back rights. “I want to see everything adapted the way I envision it, and the way I know fans want it”, she said in March.
