Books Like The Jasmine Throne: 13 Sapphic Fantasy Reads After the Burning Kingdoms (2026)
Books like The Jasmine Throne are what you need once the Burning Kingdoms are finished and Malini and Priya have nowhere left to go. Tasha Suri’s trilogy, The Jasmine Throne (2021), The Oleander Sword (2022) and The Lotus Empire (2024), is the rare epic fantasy where the sapphic romance is the spine of the plot rather than a subplot: a princess who wants a throne, a priestess who wants her land back, and a love that keeps forcing both of them to choose. Suri’s next book, The Isle in the Silver Sea, came out in paperback in September 2026 and is up for the Aldiss Award, so there has never been a better time to read outward from her. This list covers the rest of the trilogy and Suri’s new standalone, then the sapphic epic fantasy with the same empires, magic with a cost and enemies who can’t stop loving each other, with a heat rating on every pick and four Inferno-heat sapphic paranormal romances from our own shelf at the end.
Affiliate disclosure: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Fractal Enigma earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
What Makes The Jasmine Throne Work
Malini has been exiled by her tyrant brother to the Hirana, an ancient cliffside temple in Ahiranya that was once the source of the magical deathless waters and is now a ruin. She spends her captivity plotting. Priya is a servant in the household of the regent she despises, sent up to clean the princess’s rooms and hiding what she really is: a priestess with the temple’s magic in her blood. When Malini finds out, a ruthless princess and a powerful priestess become each other’s best weapon and greatest danger. The world is built from Indian history and folklore, the politics are an empire held together by fire and prophecy, and the love story is a slow burn that never lets either woman be simply good. It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2022. Readers who loved it want morally complicated heroines, colonized lands fighting back and a romance between women on opposite sides.
Finish the Burning Kingdoms
The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri
The prophecy that named Malini rightful empress of Parijatdvipa has given her an army and a target on her back, and taking the throne from her brother will be bloody. Priya, now a thrice-born priestess and an Elder of Ahiranya, carries the power of the deathless waters without fully understanding it, while a blight spreads through every living thing. Separated by the paths they chose, they discover they still need each other to save anything at all. The middle book, and the one where the war gets real.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Oleander Sword on Amazon →
The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri
Malini is empress, as the nameless gods foretold, and to win the priesthood she faces a choice: burn on the pyre to secure her legacy, or find someone else to put there. Priya has survived the deathless waters, and beneath them a yaksa with flowering eyes and a mouth of thorns offers to protect Ahiranya in exchange for a sacrifice she has to make. The two women end up on opposite sides, each willing to destroy the other for her homeland, until a new enemy forces them back together. The finale, published November 2024.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Lotus Empire on Amazon →
The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri
Suri’s newest is a sapphic fantasy set in an England where stories shape reality. Simran is a witch of the woods, Vina is a knight of the Queen’s court, and the story they are trapped in says they will fall in love and ruin each other, as they have over hundreds of lifetimes. This time, with an assassin hunting stories like theirs, they try to write a better one. The New York Times named it one of the best romances of 2025, and the paperback arrived in September 2026. Fated lovers who are also enemies: Malini and Priya’s problem, retold as a fairy tale.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Isle in the Silver Sea on Amazon →
Books Like The Jasmine Throne: Empires and Rebellion
The Unbroken by C.L. Clark
The best match on the shelf. Touraine was stolen from Qazāl as a child and raised as a soldier of the Balladairan Empire that conquered it; Princess Luca is the Balladairan heir, sent to the rebellious colony to prove she deserves the throne. Touraine ends up in Luca’s service, secretly negotiating with the rebels, and the two women’s complicated romance is fought out across an empire on the edge of collapse. A colonized land, forbidden magic and a princess who wants power more than she wants to be good: Ahiranya and Malini, in another key. A Nebula finalist, continued in The Faithless.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See The Unbroken on Amazon →
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, a peasant girl takes her dead brother’s name, Zhu Chongba, and with it the great fate that was meant for him. She enters a monastery, then the Red Turban rebellion, then the race for an empire, opposite Ouyang, a eunuch general serving the Mongol prince he loves. Zhu marries Ma Xiuying, who loves her and is horrified by how far she will go. If Malini’s ruthlessness was your favorite part, Zhu is the next step. A Hugo finalist and British Fantasy Award winner, finished in He Who Drowned the World.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See She Who Became the Sun on Amazon →
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
Baru’s island of Taranoke was conquered by the Masquerade, the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, and she is raised in its schools until she is sent as Imperial Accountant to the rebellious province of Aurdwynn. Her plan is to climb high enough to bring the empire down from inside. Then she falls for Tain Hu, a rebel duchess, and the plan starts to cost more than she can pay. A conquered woman working for the empire that conquered her, and a love on the wrong side of a war: the most brutal sapphic epic fantasy on this list.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Traitor Baru Cormorant on Amazon →
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
Queen Sabran IX of Inys rules on the claim that her bloodline keeps the wyrm called the Nameless One chained, and she has no heir. Ead Duryan, her lady-in-waiting, is secretly a mage of the Priory, sent to protect her and loyal to a different version of history. In the East, Tané trains to ride the water dragons her people worship. 880 pages, four viewpoints and a queen-and-protector romance the whole plot turns on: the book Jasmine Throne readers are most often pointed to, for good reason. Our full list of books like The Priory of the Orange Tree goes deeper.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See The Priory of the Orange Tree on Amazon →
A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon
Shannon’s 2023 standalone prequel goes back centuries to the first rising of the wyrms, with four new viewpoints: the teenage heir Glorian Berethnet, the haunted housecarl Wulfert Glenn, Tunuva Melim of the Priory and Dumai, a temple girl who learns she is an emperor’s firstborn daughter. If the deathless waters and Ahiranya’s old gods were what you loved, this is another epic built on forgotten history.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See A Day of Fallen Night on Amazon →
Princesses, Priestesses and Palace Prisons
Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust
The best match for Malini’s captivity. Princess Soraya has poison in her skin and has spent eighteen years hidden in the palace to protect her twin brother, the shah. When a div called Parvaneh, one of the Destroyer’s demons, is captured and imprisoned, Soraya finds someone who might understand her, while a soldier named Azad offers a different kind of freedom. Drawn from the Shahnameh and Zoroastrian myth: a royal woman, a monstrous woman and a quest for a cure that forces Soraya to face what her family really is.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Girl, Serpent, Thorn on Amazon →
Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan
Lei is seventeen, from the fully human Paper caste at the bottom of Ikhara, and chosen as the ninth Paper Girl to serve the bull-demon king. At the Women’s Court, where Paper Girls are forbidden lovers, she falls for Wren, a fellow concubine with secrets of her own. Like Priya scrubbing floors in the regent’s house, Lei is a servant inside the palace that owns her, and the romance is how she starts to fight back. YA, first of a trilogy.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See Girls of Paper and Fire on Amazon →
Malice by Heather Walter
A sapphic Sleeping Beauty from the villain’s side. Alyce is half-Vila and serves the kingdom of Briar as its Dark Grace, her green blood brewing the hexes people buy to hurt each other. The queen’s daughters are cursed to find true love before twenty-one or die; Princess Aurora has a year left, refuses the princes and asks the woman everyone fears for help. Feared magic, prejudice and a princess who chooses the monster: dark and angsty in the way the Hirana chapters are.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Malice on Amazon →
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
The wild card. Gideon Nav, an indentured swordswoman of the death-cult Ninth House, is on her 87th escape attempt when Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the necromancer heir she hates, drafts her as cavalier for the Emperor’s deadly trials at Canaan House. Two women who have spent their lives as enemies, forced to depend on each other, in a gothic science fantasy full of bones and jokes. If the antagonism between Malini and Priya was the best part, this is enemies-to-something at full volume.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Gideon the Ninth on Amazon →
Read Next: Hotter Picks From Fractal Enigma
The Burning Kingdoms keep their nights mostly off the page. Ours don’t. Maeve Hollow’s sapphic paranormal romances share Suri’s favorite ingredients, cursed magic, old houses with older debts and a powerful woman who has been alone far too long, and every one is Inferno heat with a guaranteed happy ending.
A Curse Made for Two — Maeve Hollow
Her touch has burned everyone for a hundred years. Jo Rook appraises cursed objects for a living and has one rule: never touch anything with your bare hands. Hired to value the contents of a snowbound Vermont manor, she grabs the hand of the woman who lives there, and doesn’t even blister. Magic that costs the person who carries it, a woman made dangerous by her own power and the one person who can stand close enough: Priya’s deathless waters, as a love story.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Touch Starved, Witch × Appraiser, Immortal × Mortal, Age Gap, Ice Queen, Gloves, Haunted Manor, Snowed In, Forced Proximity
Start reading A Curse Made for Two →
The Ex-Hex of Hollow House — Maeve Hollow
She left me twenty years ago. She hasn’t aged a day. And her house wants to keep me. Contractor Kit Mercer can fix rotten beams and failing foundations, so she takes a job shoring up a dying mansion and finds the witch she loved two decades ago living inside it. Second chances, stolen memories and a woman who walked away once already: Malini and Priya’s separation in The Oleander Sword, with a reunion that doesn’t fade to black.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Second Chance, Supernatural Exes, Witch × Contractor, Haunted House, Gothic, Only One Bed, Immortal × Mortal, Stolen Memory, She Always Asks First
Start reading The Ex-Hex of Hollow House →
The Portrait of Lady Ash — Maeve Hollow
She’s been painted shut for 159 years. Celeste Arden is a conservator who doesn’t believe in anything she can’t test, working on an island house where the lady in the portrait turns out to be very much awake. The woman in the frame is the first in a century and a half to be asked permission for anything. A noblewoman imprisoned by magic and the commoner who comes in to clean: The Jasmine Throne’s opening, gothic and Inferno.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Conservator × Witch, Trapped in a Painting, Immortal × Mortal, Age Gap, Gothic, Island Forced Proximity, Instruction Kink, Touch Starved
Start reading The Portrait of Lady Ash →
A Taste for the Widow — Maeve Hollow
Thirteen nights. One immortal widow. A house that wants a bride. Estate attorney Mara Ellison drives up the coast to inventory a dead woman’s cliffside house and sell it before the cliff takes it. Then she reads the codicil, which reaches back to 1849, and finds out what she has really inherited. A contract, an ice queen with centuries of patience and terms negotiated in writing: for readers who loved Malini’s bargaining as much as her kisses.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Vampire Romance, Gothic, Haunted House, Forced Proximity, Immortal × Mortal Age Gap, Ice Queen, Power Exchange, Written Terms
Start reading A Taste for the Widow →
For the whole shelf, see the Maeve Hollow author page.
FAQ: Books Like The Jasmine Throne
What order do you read the Burning Kingdoms in?
The Jasmine Throne (2021), The Oleander Sword (2022), The Lotus Empire (2024). It’s one continuous story, so read them in order. The Isle in the Silver Sea is a separate standalone.
Is The Jasmine Throne a romance?
It’s epic fantasy with a central sapphic slow burn between Malini and Priya that runs through all three books. The politics and magic carry equal weight, so expect a war story first and a love story a very close second.
How spicy is The Jasmine Throne?
Mild. There is intimacy, but it’s brief and not the focus. On this list, The Unbroken and She Who Became the Sun go further; for Inferno heat, A Curse Made for Two is fully explicit. Our romance spice levels guide explains the chili scale used above.
Which book should I read first after the trilogy?
The Unbroken for the closest match in politics and romance, The Isle in the Silver Sea for more Suri, The Priory of the Orange Tree for a bigger world.
Get the Bonus Chapters First
Join the Fractal Enigma newsletter for new releases, free reads and bonus scenes we don’t post anywhere else.
