Most publishers announce a book with a press release and a slightly nervous tweet. Bloomsbury has sent Sarah J. Maas’s next novel on tour across Europe like a band with a new album. Fans in Amsterdam woke up yesterday to find a billboard in Rembrandtplein carrying a single unexplained line from A Court of Forgotten Melody, the seventh A Court of Thorns and Roses novel: “You’re going to help me remake the world.” No context, no speaker, no mercy. The next instalment of this literary treasure hunt is due at the East Side Mall in Berlin on 19 and 20 November.
For the record, the billboard wasn’t the cover reveal, whatever the trending list says. The cover and title were unveiled back in August on Maas’s Instagram and on digital billboards in Los Angeles, Denver and New York: an intricately illustrated creature on a gold-to-teal gradient, in the house style of the series. The Amsterdam board is part of a second wave of teasers. An earlier quote, “You can’t just make a God”, went out on Bloomsbury’s Instagram. Taken together, the two lines suggest somebody in Prythian is planning a spot of cosmic redecorating. Some fans are already convinced it points towards a crossover with Maas’s Throne of Glass books. Nobody official has said so, and speculation is the oxygen these campaigns run on.
The book itself lands on 12 January 2027, and it’s a substantial thing, listed at nearly 900 pages. It carries Movements II and III of The Valkyrie Cycle, which began with A Court of Splintered Harmony just a fortnight ago. That one, which we previewed before its 27 October launch, promptly became the fastest-selling adult fantasy novel in the UK since records began in 1998. The blurb for Forgotten Melody promises that what was lost will be reclaimed, with the Night Court’s Inner Circle scattered far and wide in search of any advantage against Koschei and his allies.
Eleven weeks between two doorstops is a gap that would make some fantasy authors’ readers weep with envy. Those of us who have been waiting for certain winds to blow since 2011 will be watching enviously from the sidelines. For everyone else, the sensible plan is to lift weights between now and January, because a book of that heft is as much a fitness regime as a reading experience.
Here at SFcrowsnest we admire the showmanship. Teasing a novel one sentence at a time across European capitals is the kind of thing Hammer’s publicity department would have loved, had it been able to afford the train fares. If the pattern holds, by Christmas someone in Paris or Madrid will be photographing a line of dialogue on a station wall and reading it as a prophecy. In this series, that’s probably the correct response.
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