The Jasmine Throne

Empire and the Knowledge It Destroys

The Parijatdvipa Empire has built itself on conquest — economic, military, and cultural. The nations it absorbed have been stripped of their languages, their religions, their practices, their histories. The empire calls this civilisation. The people it has colonised call it something else.

The magical tradition of the conquered Ahiranya — the power of the natborn, women who can call on the living world through their blood — has been suppressed for generations. It is dangerous, the empire says. Unnatural. Heresy.

Priya, a servant in the household of Malini (a princess imprisoned by her brother the emperor), is one of the last natborn. She has survived by hiding what she is.

Malini, the princess, is imprisoned for refusing to comply with her brother’s political agenda. She is brilliant, ruthlessly self-aware about her own ambitions, and not someone to trust easily.

This is the setup for Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, and what Suri does with it over 480 pages is one of the finest achievements in recent fantasy fiction.

The Romance

The central romantic relationship between Priya and Malini is developed with extraordinary care. Suri does not rush it. The first half of the novel is about wariness and necessity — two people who have every reason to be cautious about each other, finding reasons to trust more than they intended. The relationship develops through small gestures, through the specific intimacy of caretaking, through conversations in which both characters are simultaneously honest and strategic.

By the time the romance becomes explicit, it has been so carefully built that the emotional effect is proportionate to the buildup. Suri understands that romance is most powerful when it is earned slowly in a context where both people have substantive reasons not to risk what they’re risking.

The sapphic element is not incidental or tokenistic — it is central to the dynamic. Both women have specific reasons why their attraction is risky, and both have specific interiorities that shape how they experience and express it.

The Parijatdvipa World

Suri builds her world from the traditions of the Indian subcontinent rather than European fantasy conventions, and the result is a setting that feels both specific and unfamiliar in productive ways. The caste structures, the religious traditions, the specific landscape, the ways that colonialism has reshaped the cultural geography — all of this is rendered with the depth that comes from genuine knowledge.

The magic system — the natborn’s ability to call on living flowers and sacred waters — is tied to this cultural world in ways that make it meaningful rather than just mechanically powerful. Magic in this novel is not simply an ability that some people have; it is a form of connection to a specific landscape and tradition that the empire has tried to destroy.

The Political Complexity

The Priory of the Orange Tree trilogy, of which this is the first book, has a political complexity that requires sustained attention. The empire’s factions, the resistance movements within conquered territories, the specific power dynamics within the ruling family — these are not simplified into good and evil but rendered as competing interests with comprehensible motivations.

This complexity is demanding in the opening hundred pages, as the world establishes itself. Readers who persist find themselves in a political landscape that rewards the attention it requires.

A Deserved Reputation

The Jasmine Throne won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror and was nominated for numerous other awards, recognitions that reflect its achievement. It is a fantasy novel that succeeds at multiple ambitious aims simultaneously: world-building, romance, political complexity, and thematic depth about colonialism and cultural survival.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — One of the finest fantasy novels of recent years. The sapphic romance is beautifully developed, the world is genuinely imaginative, and the themes about empire and cultural knowledge are handled with sophistication.