As the tenth anniversary of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series came and went last year, ACOTAR fans took on the desperate tone of a fandom that was promised Reputation (Taylor’s Version) and got only an overflowing basket of “Easter eggs.” Tune your social-media algorithm to BookTok or Bookstagram and you’d find thousands of posts predicting the ACOTAR 6 release date, speculating on what the next book is about, and complaining about something called A Court of Shaded Truths (which is totally fake).
But on March 4, 2025, Maas finally revealed that she doesn’t plan to be the George R.R. Martin of romantasy. On the Call Her Daddy podcast, SJM announced that ACOTAR 6 will release on October 27, 2026 … followed just two months later by ACOTAR 7 on January 12, 2027.
Here’s a guide — which is spoiler free except for two clearly noted sections — to all the latest news and updates on the new A Court of Thorns and Roses books, and what might be next for the rest of the 16-book “Maasverse.”
What did Sarah J. Maas announce on Call Her Daddy?
She’s dropping two new ACOTAR books in the 10 months, and a third whose release date is TBD.
During her March 4 appearance on Call Her Daddy, Maas told host Alex Cooper that the forthcoming ACOTARs are a four-part story, which will unfold over three books. “The story that was finally ready to come out of me was big — really, really, really big,” she said.
ACOTAR 6, which comes out October 27, 2026, will cover part one. ACOTAR 7, which comes out January 12, 2027, includes parts two and three. ACOTAR 8 will be the fourth part of the story. (Why not four books for four parts of the story? She didn’t say. But what fun is fantasy without something nerdy to explain to the uninitiated?)
Maas did not share the title or cover design for any of the new books. She said she’s still working on ACOTAR 8, and it’s unclear when that might be released. She also said, confusingly, that these three-books shouldn’t be thought of as a trilogy.
“So it’s basically gonna be like three physical volumes, but it’s like one thing altogether that like no amount of glue in like any publisher’s like factory could ever like hold this,” she said. “So it’s meant to be read ideally as like one massive, massive story as opposed to like in like a trilogy. It’s not a trilogy. Like arcs aren’t like wrapped up.”
After the podcast aired on YouTube, Maas posted her own announcement:
Bloomsbury Publishing also put out an official announcement:
What else has Sarah J. Maas said about the next ACOTAR book?
Prior to the Call Her Daddy appearance, Maas hadn’t given any updates on the book since July 11, 2025, when she announced that she has finished the first draft. The Instagram video showed her closing a notebook that says “ACOTAR 6” on the cover, shutting a laptop, then popping champagne. The caption read “First drafts DONE.”
Maas had been mentioning that she was working on the sixth ACOTAR book for the past two years, but updates had been few and far between.
Before Call Her Daddy, Maas’s last major interview was in January 2024, when she appeared on the Today show to promote the third book in her Crescent City series. She told NBC’s Jenna Bush Hager that she plans “years down the line,” so she knows the “next four books that I want to write.” When Hager asked which series she’s focusing on next, she confirmed that a new ACOTAR book was in the works.
“So that’s going to be the next Court of Thorns and Roses book,” Maas said. “I’m very, very excited about that one.”
A few months later, on April 3, 2024, Maas shared an Instagram post that made it pretty clear she was heading back to Prythian:
And Maas promised she’d have a book-six update “soon” in a December 2024 TikTok about Spotify releasing new versions of the audiobooks.
“I’m not gonna tell you guys anything” about the sixth book, Maas said. “No surprise, it’s going to be a long book. It’s too early for me to tell you who it will be about and what’s going to happen, but I hope to have more details for you soon.”
@spotify ACOTAR fans, author of the year Sarah J. Maas spills the tea. #SpotifyWrapped #booktok #acotar #sarahjmaas
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Was ACOTAR 6 delayed?
Not really, but if you look back at SJM’s path from self-publishing her first book online to becoming the best-selling author of 2024, it’s easy to see why her fans were getting impatient.
Maas is a prolific writer. Her first book, Throne of Glass, came out in 2012, and she released at least one book in that series every year until the final installment came out in 2018. Meanwhile, she published A Court of Thorns and Roses in 2015; new ACOTAR books came out in 2016, 2017, and 2018. So during that period, Maas was usually releasing two books a year.
Then her pace slowed down considerably. Maas became a mother in 2018 and had a second child in 2022. Her books also got a lot longer (i.e., 800-plus pages) and increasingly interconnected. These are her past four releases:
• House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City 1) — March 3, 2020
• A Court of Silver Flames (ACOTAR 5) — February 16, 2021
• House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City 2) — February 15, 2022
• House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City 3) — January 30, 2024
ACOTAR is Maas’s most popular series, and between 2021 and 2024 she was mainly been focused on Crescent City. The gap between Silver Flames and ACOTAR 6 is already the longest stretch there has ever been between subsequent installments in one of her series.
Plus, obviously, the world changed a lot during those years. While BookTok’s role in Maas’s success is often overstated (her books regularly appeared on best-seller lists well before TikTok existed), it is true that droves of Maas fans first heard about her via the app. And BookTok is a double-edged sword. The same community of online readers that supercharged SJM’s rise is now clamoring for fresh ACOTAR content (despite getting some crossover action in later Crescent City books). After the Today show tease, some fans speculated that book six would come out in late 2024 or early 2025. When that didn’t pan out, it created the perception that the next installment was delayed, though Maas was always vague about her timeline.
Has SJM explained why the next book took so long?
Yes. Maas told Today that she’d be publishing at a slower pace going forward because she’s now balancing her career with raising her two young children.
“Before I had kids, I was writing two books a year, but I also had no social life,” she said. “Like, I was basically Gollum in my little writing cave, just writing all day. But now I get to see the sunlight thanks to my children needing to, like, go out to school. So the writing pace has slowed down a little bit — you know, a book a year, a book every year and a half. It’s a tough thing, to have a job and to need to show up and focus on that job, but then to also be able to focus on your children.”
Um, isn’t the next book actually ACOTAR 5?
Some people argue that the fourth ACOTAR book, A Court of Frost and Starlight, should be counted as book 3.5 since it’s only a novella. But this is like the romantasy version of pointing out that the year 2000 technically wasn’t the start of a new millennium. Most people refer to the next book as ACOTAR 6, though it will be only the fifth full-length novel in the series. And this debate was settled once SJM herself referred to the next book as “ACOTAR 6” in her “drafts done” Instagram post, and then the Call Her Daddy podcast.
Do we have a title for ACOTAR 6 or ACOTAR 7?
No. On Call Her Daddy, Maas said she isn’t ready to reveal that. It probably isn’t worth speculating about, as many SJM titles are only tangentially related to the book’s content. Are mist and fury really essential to the plot of ACOTAR 2? According to legend (i.e., a Maas newsletter that’s no longer online), she considered several other options and just liked the word fury.
What are ACOTAR 6 and ACOTAR 7 about? (No spoilers.)
Probably Elain. The first three books are from Feyre’s point of view, the novella is multi-POV, and the last book focuses on Nesta, the eldest Archeron sister. Maas has said for years that each sister would get her own book at some point, and she has set up a lot of Elain plotlines, from her unresolved romantic situation, to her abilities, to questions about where she really belongs. While promoting Silver Flames in 2021, Maas said she “thought it was pretty obvious” whom the next book is about. Elain is the obvious answer.
On Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper asked Maas if she could tell us whose POV the next book is from. She said “no,” and teased that we’ll get some unexpected perspectives. “That was one of the like surprising things for me, like writing this and like what came out,” she said. “Like it’s, you got a lot of like, insight to like various things.”
What is ACOTAR 6 About? (With spoilers.)
FINAL SPOILER WARNING: IF YOU HAVEN’T READ ALL OF ACOTAR AND CRESCENT CITY, SKIP TO THE NEXT QUESTION.
Though Silver Flames, and particularly the Azriel bonus chapter, hinted at an Elain-Azriel-Lucien love triangle, who knows? The Maasverse keeps expanding, and SJM has been known to make delightfully wacky decisions. (Did anyone think the penultimate Throne of Glass book would focus on Chaol? How many fantasy series include a holiday special?)
Here’s just a sampling of the more unconventional ACOTAR 6 plot theories floating around the internet:
• The next book focuses on Azriel. Yes, it seems “pretty obvious” that he’d be the male lead in an Elain book, as they have a budding romance and Silver Flames alternated between Nesta and Cassian POVs. But some have posited that the book is mainly about Azriel, not Elain, with more on his relationship with Gwyn or some other love interest.
• The Crescent City crossover continues — though SJM seemed to decisively shoot down the Bryceriel shippers on Call Her Daddy.
• More Mor content. We learn the full story on what happened between Morrigan and Eris, discover who or what was watching her in the woods, and find out what the heck it means to have the “power of truth.”
• A Court of Even More Silver Flames. Why should only Feyre get a trilogy and half a novella? Book six could be Nesta’s ACOMAF, culminating in a huge exposition dump in which Cassian explains why he didn’t actually eat that stale biscuit.
• Tamlin redemption arc? There’s been some fan speculation that the “Beauty and the Beast” retelling from ACOTAR 1 has barely begun, and someday we’ll all feel bad for nicknaming him Tampon.
On Call Her Daddy, Maas said that while she’s curious about where Tamlin’s story goes, deciding whether he’ll have a full redemption arc is “probably, like, the hardest thing for me to figure out” because of the impact the Tamlin-Feyre story has had on many readers.
“It’s tricky because I’ve had so many women, especially including some like very dear friends of mine who like come up and told me about like how they saw their own abusive relationship mirrored in Tamlin,” she said. “And so if I were to ever write like more about Tamlin, it would be done in a way where like, it doesn’t erase what he has done and it doesn’t like invalidate the feelings of like my readers who have connected to that.”
Will there be a ninth ACOTAR book?
It’s unclear. While Maas referred to the eighth ACOTAR book as a “conclusion” on Call Her Daddy, she might have meant that it’s the end of the four-part story she’s telling over the next three books, not the final book in the series.
“So there’s gonna be like a lot of ACOTAR in a very short time,” she said. “And then eventually, like, the conclusion will be like written like once, once I get, I wanna get these, like I don’t want anyone to wait any longer.”
What other books is Sarah J. Maas working on?
Maas told Today that there will be a fourth Crescent City book, though “you will have to wait a bit.” She also teased another mysterious upcoming book.
“There’s one book that I’m going to be writing after this next ACOTAR book that I’m very excited about. I’m not going to say what world it’s in. I’m not going to say anything,” she said. “But it’s a story that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for a long time … I think it’s going to be a very emotional book for me to write, just in terms of the world I’ll be writing and the characters that might pop up.”
@todayshow #SarahJMaas reveals that she already knows what stories she wants towrite next! Head to the link in our bio to read the full digital interview with Sarah or find it on today.com. #TODAYShow #ACOTAR #ThroneOfGlass #CrescentCity #BookTok
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It definitely sounds as though she’s talking about another Throne of Glass book. Several years ago, she quipped that her first series “is technically ended — but is it?” She could also be hinting at the Twilight of the Gods series, which fans are convinced she’s writing based on a now-deleted Pinterest board. With SJM, you just never know. As she explained back in 2017, sometimes she secretly writes fan fiction of her own work, gets drunk and reveals this to her editor, and suddenly lots of ladies have Nesta tattoos.