Sarah J. Maas

Sarah J. Maas is one of the authors most responsible for romantasy's rise from niche to mainstream shelf staple. She debuted with Throne of Glass, begun as a teenage writing project posted online before it became a bestselling series following Celaena Sardothien, an assassin navigating court intrigue and her own hidden past across an eight-book arc that grows steadily darker and more political as it goes.

Her second major series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, reimagines Beauty and the Beast through Feyre, a human huntress drawn into a war between fae courts, and became her most commercially dominant work, driving much of the recent "romantasy" retail boom and BookTok's embrace of the genre. Maas has since launched Crescent City, an urban fantasy series set in a modern-magic city, aimed at an explicitly adult readership and structured to eventually intersect with characters from both Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses in a shared universe.

Because Maas builds long, tightly serialized arcs, new readers should commit to reading each series in full publication order rather than sampling standalone entries — Throne of Glass in particular has an infamous prequel-novella complication (the collection The Assassin's Blade fits before book two) that reading guides typically flag. New readers should start with either Throne of Glass or A Court of Thorns and Roses, depending on a preference for high fantasy or fae romance; Crescent City needs no prior knowledge yet rewards it as the shared universe develops.