Author E.L. James is no stranger to writing a massive hit. The British writer is best known for her international best-selling Fifty Shades series, which has sold over 150 million copies worldwide. After releasing the Fifty Shades trilogy, James wrote the Mister and Missus duology.
Now, three years later, she’s back with her latest title.
Announced on June 1st, 2026, James is back with her introduction to the Young Adult, Fantasy space. Her next novel, Land of Ghosts, will be published on October 20th, 2026.
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Speaking exclusively to Cosmopolitan about the upcoming novel, James gave a brief overview of what readers can expect fro the book saying:
“‘Land of Ghosts’ is an impossible love story – a tale of grief, healing, love, loss, and fantastical worlds. Emily Beauchamp, the gifted daughter of a loving family, loses everything in an instant – her parents, her brother, her future, and her hope. Forced to move London and move in with a distant relative, Emily arrives carrying unbearable loss, only to discover that his house has secrets of its own.”
Breaking into the YA world is an entirely new endeavor for James, who previously has been known for her extremely adult stories and even self-describes herself as someone who writes “provocative romance.” The Fifty Shades series, which put her on the map and made her one of Britain’s top-earning authors in 2013 according to Forbes, is indisputably adult and erotic. She called writing the series “my midlife crisis, writ large. All my fantasies in there, and that’s it.”
James’ duology that came after Fifty Shades was met with mostly negative reviews.Land of Ghosts is currently slated to be a duology, although no further details for the second book have been released as of yet.
Land of Ghosts is available for preorder now in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
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