Throne of Glass in Order (and the Tandem Read)

Eight books, one assassin, and a series that starts as a competition story in a castle and ends somewhere enormously larger. Below is the order Maas and her publisher actually recommend, followed by the two variants people will offer you and what each one costs.

The recommended Throne of Glass order

This is publication order, and it is also the order the author recommends:

1. Throne of Glass (2012) — Celaena Sardothien is pulled out of a salt mine to compete for the position of King's Champion. The smallest and most contained book in the series by far.
2. Crown of Midnight (2013) — The consequences of winning. Tighter, darker, and the point at which the series stops being a competition story.
3. The Assassin's Blade (2014) — Five prequel novellas collected in one volume, covering Celaena's life before book one. Read here — not first — because it lands as revelation rather than as backstory.
4. Heir of Fire (2014) — The map opens up. A new continent, a new mentor, and the slowest-burning book in the series.
5. Queen of Shadows (2015) — Threads from all four previous books converge. The most conventionally satisfying instalment.
6. Empire of Storms (2016) — Half the cast, moving toward war. Ends on the series' hardest cliffhanger.
7. Tower of Dawn (2017) — The other half of the cast, in the southern continent, during exactly the same weeks as Empire of Storms. Chaol's book, and far better than its reputation among people who skipped it.
8. Kingdom of Ash (2018) — The finale, which assumes you have read both of the two previous books. Enormous, and it does pay off.

The prequel volume is the one people get wrong most often. Reading The Assassin's Blade before book one turns a devastating series of reveals into a set of facts you already had.

Empire of Storms and Tower of Dawn happen simultaneously

This is the real structural quirk. Books six and seven cover the same span of time with two separate groups of characters, and Kingdom of Ash picks up from both. You cannot skip Tower of Dawn — a substantial part of the finale is unreadable without it.

There are two workable approaches. The simple one: read Empire of Storms, then Tower of Dawn, then Kingdom of Ash. The other: the tandem read, alternating chapters between the two books using one of the widely circulated chapter-by-chapter guides, so that the two storylines unfold in step. The tandem read is more work and is genuinely better; it also removes the whiplash of leaving a cliffhanger to spend a whole book somewhere else.

The 'emotional order' variant

You will also see a version that moves The Assassin's Blade to after Heir of Fire, on the grounds that a particular relationship in the prequels hits harder once you understand what it cost. This is a community preference rather than an author recommendation, and it is defensible — but it is a refinement for a reread, not a route for a first pass.

For a first read: books one and two, then the prequels, then straight through.

How it relates to Maas's other series

Throne of Glass is independent. It shares no plot with ACOTAR or Crescent City, and you can start with it cold. It is also the least romance-forward of the three — the romance is central but the series is a war epic first, which is worth knowing if romantasy is what you came for.