The Prisoner's Throne

The Prisoner's Throne is a fantasy novel by the American writer Holly Black, published in 2024 and set in the world of Elfhame.

The book continues the story begun in The Stolen Heir, and its position is deliberately uncomfortable: Oak is a hostage who is also a guest, his captor is a queen he helped create and a woman he has loved since childhood, and every conversation is conducted with an audience in mind. Oak's charm is his only weapon in most of these scenes, and the novel is careful about the difference between a person who is good at persuasion and a person who can be trusted, which is the question the two of them have been circling since the previous volume. Black has written the faerie courts for years, and the novel's politics work through manners rather than battles, since a promise, a title and a debt are all enforceable and the characters have to survive by choosing their words carefully. There is a war coming, and the alliances that will decide it are being assembled out of marriages, insults and favours, which is why the book spends much of its length in rooms rather than on battlefields. It is the second part of a story about Oak, Wren and the price of the crown that was taken from them.