You finished Fourth Wing, then Iron Flame, and now you are standing at the edge of the wait for the next one with a specific kind of hunger that only a very good book leaves behind. The problem is that Fourth Wing is a strange thing to try to replace. Its appeal is a cocktail — dragons, a brutal military college where the exams can kill you, a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers with the most guarded love interest in the genre, a heroine who is physically fragile and refuses to let it stop her, and a level of spice the fantasy shelf did not used to admit to. Very few books hit all of those at once, which is why this one detonated the way it did.
So the honest approach is not to promise a clone — there isn’t one, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. It is to work out which part you were really there for, and send you towards the book that does that part best. Some of these you have almost certainly heard of. A few you may not have. All of them scratch at least one of the itches Fourth Wing left behind, and the trick is knowing which itch is yours.
The Two You Have Probably Already Read
If you are deep enough into romantasy to have found Fourth Wing, these two are likely already on your shelf. They are listed anyway, because leaving them off a list like this would be dishonest, and because if you somehow have not read them, everything else can wait.
If you came for the fae and the slow-burn payoff: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
Feyre is a mortal huntress who kills the wrong wolf and is dragged into the faerie land of Prythian by its masked, beast-like lord. What begins as a Beauty-and-the-Beast retelling becomes something much larger — a story about courts, curses, and a war that outgrows the fairytale it started as — and the series pivots hard in its second book into the enemies-to-lovers dynamic that made the whole fandom lose its mind. This is the closest thing romantasy has to a foundational text; half the tropes you loved in Fourth Wing were load-bearing here first. Fair warning: the first book is the slowest and least spicy of the bunch, so the standard advice holds — start here, but the reward is in A Court of Mist and Fury.
If you came for the forbidden romance and the twisty world: From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Poppy is the Maiden, chosen by the gods, forbidden from human touch, and kept ignorant of her own nature. Hawke is the guard assigned to protect her, and his identity turns out to be a great deal more complicated than a bodyguard’s should be — which is all that can be said without ruining the best turn in the book. It is a forbidden slow burn wrapped around a world that keeps pulling the rug out, with medium-to-high spice and a love interest whose secrets rival Xaden’s for sheer wattage. Alongside Fourth Wing and ACOTAR, this is the third pillar the entire genre rests on — and the one people are most surprised to find they cannot put down.
The Deeper Cuts
Here is where a list like this earns its place. If you have already devoured the famous ones, these are the books matched to the specific thing you loved.
If you came for the deadly trials: The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent
This is the closest structural cousin to Fourth Wing on the list. Oraya is a human raised by the vampire king who adopted her, surviving in a world built to kill her kind, and her one path to something better runs through the Kejari — a brutal, goddess-run tournament of trials that most competitors do not walk away from. To survive it she allies with Raihn, a ruthless rival she should not trust and cannot stop wanting, and the two of them carve out something real in the least safe place imaginable. If what hooked you in Fourth Wing was the graduate-or-die pressure cooker and the enemies forced onto the same side, start here. One honest note: the spice is lower and arrives late, so come for the trials and the tension rather than the heat.
If you came for the fierce heroine forced into a warrior’s life: A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen
Freya is gutting fish in a marriage she hates when a betrayal drags her secret into the light: she carries a drop of a goddess’s blood, which makes her a shield maiden the powerful want to own. Forced into the service of a power-hungry jarl and guarded by his infuriating, magnetic son — who is under strict orders to keep her alive and no orders at all about keeping his distance — she has to learn to fight and to wield magic while resisting the one person she should not want. It is Norse-flavoured, prophecy-driven, and properly spicy, and it maps almost exactly onto the fragile-woman-forced-to-become-a-weapon arc that anchors Fourth Wing.
If you came for the morally grey warrior and the heat: Quicksilver by Callie Hart
The book that had the romantasy world in a headlock in 2024. Saeris is a desert thief hiding alchemical powers who accidentally opens a portal and lands in a frozen fae realm, bound to Kingfisher, a brooding, secret-keeping warrior whose own mind is being eaten by the magic he carries. Snarky banter, a slow burn that pays off at a four-chilli level, and a love interest who out-broods most of the genre. What makes it work is that Saeris is not a doormat and not a firecracker for the sake of it; she is competent, wary, and always quietly planning her way home, which makes the moments she chooses to stay land all the harder. If Xaden was the reason you kept turning pages, this is the nearest thing to that particular flavour of doom, and there is a sequel already out with a third book on the way, so the obsession has somewhere to go.
If you came for the dragons above everything: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
No list for Fourth Wing readers is complete without at least one book where the dragons are the point. Priory is a standalone epic where one of the four viewpoint characters trains her whole life to become a dragonrider, set in a world split between those who worship dragons and those who fear them, anchored by a slow-burn sapphic romance at the royal court. The dragon lore here is some of the richest in modern fantasy, and the payoff of a single self-contained doorstopper — no cliffhanger, no seven-book commitment — is its own kind of relief. Be warned that this is a different animal from the others here: eight hundred pages, a slower and denser build, and a low, closed-door heat level. Come to it for the scale and the dragon lore, not for the spice, and give it the patience it asks for.
What No Book Will Quite Give You
The one thing Fourth Wing has that is hard to find elsewhere is the exact combination of a magic military academy and a dragon-riding romance at that heat level. The academy piece in particular is rare — most of the nearest matches trade the war college for a deadly tournament, a royal court, or a battlefield. There is a reason for that: a school where the coursework can kill you is a very specific engine, and building one well is harder than it looks. If that setting was the hook for you, temper your expectations a little, lean on The Serpent and the Wings of Night for the trials-and-training feeling, and know that the genre is racing to fill the gap Fourth Wing exposed — new dragon-and-academy books are landing every season now, chasing the same lightning.
The other thing worth knowing going in: spice levels swing widely across this list. From Blood and Ash, A Fate Inked in Blood, and Quicksilver run hot; The Serpent and the Wings of Night and Priory run cooler. Match the book to the mood you are in, not just the premise that sounds closest.
Where to Start
If you want the fastest hit of the Fourth Wing feeling, go to Quicksilver for the morally grey love interest or The Serpent and the Wings of Night for the deadly-trials structure. If you want dragons and are willing to slow down for them, Priory is waiting. If it was the fragile-heroine-turned-warrior arc that gutted you, A Fate Inked in Blood is the one. And if you have somehow not read ACOTAR or From Blood and Ash yet, close this tab and go fix that first; the rest of the list will keep.
None of these is Fourth Wing, and that is the point. The book you are missing does not have a twin, and chasing an exact copy is the fastest way to be disappointed by six perfectly good novels. But the specific thing you loved about it almost certainly lives somewhere on this list, whether that was the dragons, the doom, the trials, or the guarded man who softens only for her. Find your itch, and go scratch it.
For more readalike guides like this one, the newsletter is where they land first, one obsession at a time.