Realm of Ash

About Realm of Ash

The second entry in Tasha Suri's Books of Ambha series, Realm of Ash builds on the world established in Empire of Sand while moving to an entirely new pair of protagonists—a structural gamble that pays off in full. The novel follows Arwa, a young widow whose Amrithi heritage has made her an object of suspicion throughout her life, and Zahir, an imperial prince who works in secret to access a dangerous space between the living and the dead known as the realm of ash. Thrown together by desperation and political necessity, they must use forbidden Amrithi rites to try to save an empire already coming apart at the seams. Suri handles the shift in protagonists with considerable skill. Arwa is a different kind of heroine from Mehr—more guarded, more conditioned by shame, her sense of self shaped by years of concealment. Her gradual opening, both to her own power and to Zahir, forms the emotional spine of the novel. Zahir, meanwhile, is one of the more thoughtfully drawn male leads in recent fantasy: intellectual, principled, and genuinely uncertain in ways that feel like character rather than plot convenience. The realm of ash itself is one of Suri's most evocative inventions—a dreamlike landscape of ancestral memory and ghostly remnants, rendered with the same patient, atmospheric prose that made the first book so distinctive. The magic here is darker and stranger than in Empire of Sand, and Suri leans into the attendant dread without sacrificing the intimacy that defines the series. What carries Realm of Ash is the same quality that distinguished the debut: a refusal to let romance exist apart from the larger forces—political, colonial, spiritual—shaping her characters' choices. For readers who found Empire of Sand too slow, this book is unlikely to change their minds. For everyone else, it is a worthy continuation of an underappreciated series and, in some respects, a more emotionally complex book than its predecessor.

Tropes & Themes