Throne of Glass

Throne of Glass is the first novel of Sarah J. Maas's first series, released on 2 August 2012. It is set in the kingdom of Adarlan, whose king has outlawed magic and taken most of the continent, and it opens in the salt mines of Endovier, where the assassin Celaena Sardothien has been serving a sentence for a year.

Celaena is offered a way out that is really a bargain. The crown prince, Dorian Havilliard, enters her in a competition to become the king's champion: if she wins she serves the crown for four years, and if she loses she returns to Endovier or dies on the way. The competition brings her into the palace, where the captain of the guard, Chaol Westfall, is assigned to watch her, and where the other competitors begin dying one at a time.

The palace turns out to be as dangerous as the mines. There are courtiers with their own plans, a king who is not what his subjects are told, and a series of deaths that Celaena has to investigate without giving away her own position. Maas gives her allies among the nobility and the guard, and the question of what is killing the champions and the wider question of what Adarlan's king is protecting become the same problem.

The book began as a story Maas wrote as a teenager and grew into a series of seven novels with a companion collection of novellas. Crown of Midnight followed in 2013 and the series closes with Kingdom of Ash. This first volume establishes Celaena, the palace and the competition that sets everything after it moving.