Sarah J. Maas readers have spent two months staring at a cover of burning bones and a set of teeth as if it were the Voynich manuscript. The good news is that the wait is nearly over. A Court of Splintered Harmony, the sixth A Court of Thorns and Roses novel, is published by Bloomsbury on 27 October, and the run-up has already acquired the full fandom accessories kit: a cover row, a leak, a moderator vote and a great deal of squinting at photographs.
It’s the first new trip to Prythian since A Court of Silver Flames back in February 2021. Maas announced three more books on the Call Her Daddy podcast in March, then in August wiped her social media, turned her website into a darkened landing page and unveiled the titles of books six and seven on Instagram, with digital billboards in Los Angeles, Denver and New York doing the town crier’s job. Book seven, A Court of Forgotten Melody, follows on 12 January 2027, and the new run is branded the Valkyrie Cycle.
So what do we actually know, without tipping into spoiler territory? The official blurb gives us Koschei the Deathless, lifted from Slavic folklore, bound to a mountain lake for millennia and now stirring, with allies keen to claw back what used to be the human lands. The Night Court, meanwhile, is reeling from betrayals and unwelcome truths, and has to patch up its own relationships before it can deal with anything else. The tagline promises that what was broken will be remade, which in romantasy terms generally means somebody is about to have a very complicated evening. At 352 pages it’s comparatively svelte by Maas standards, which suggests book seven will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The fandom has also had a pre-release jolt in the form of photographs, shared on the r/acotar subreddit, that purportedly show pages 242 to 247 of the novel. Nobody official has confirmed whether they’re genuine, and readers have been dissecting the prose and even the household clutter in the background with the forensic zeal of a CSI unit. The subreddit’s moderators put the question of whether to allow discussion to a community vote, and the ayes had it, with conditions attached. Bloomsbury, for its part, has posted its own first-look photos of a finished copy, which the faithful have been poring over with much the same intensity.
Television remains the one door that hasn’t opened. Hulu’s long-gestating adaptation was dropped in 2025, though Maas is reportedly still keen to find the books another home on screen, and she will doubtless have noticed Prime Video pressing on with Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing.
If you’d rather arrive on 27 October unspoiled, now is the time to mute a few keywords and keep well clear of BookTok. For everyone else, there’s a mountain lake, an ancient enemy and an entire court in urgent need of family therapy. Prythian has rarely sounded more like home.
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