Romantasy has taken over bestseller lists and BookTok, and with the sixth ACOTAR book, A Court of Splintered Harmony, landing in shops on 27 October, there's a fresh excuse to chase the real-world backdrops behind these fictional worlds. Turns out, many of the genre's biggest authors built their realms from places they've actually walked through.

Scotland looms large. Sarah J. Maas has said a trip to the Isle of Skye with her husband shaped her vision of the prison in A Court of Mist & Fury — she could picture monsters locked up in that kind of raw landscape. She's also borrowed from English, Irish and Hindu mythology, on the grounds that limiting yourself to one tradition is no fun. Callie Hart, author of the Quicksilver series, is another Highlands devotee: she lived in Scotland years ago and still calls it one of her favourite countries, while the snowy forest settings in her Fae & Alchemy books trace back to time spent in ski resorts. Her desert city, where water is scarce, came from a stint in Abu Dhabi — bleak, she says, but with a strange beauty.

Rebecca Yarros, whose Fourth Wing series is a global phenomenon, hasn't pinned her fantasy world to specific map coordinates, but she grew up on Tolkien and made a pilgrimage to the Shire in New Zealand during a book tour — sister in tow, posing in Hobbit doors. Her real formative landscape was military: a childhood moving between bases, including Germany around the fall of the Berlin Wall, then Colorado at 12, and a husband who served until 2019. That world of duty, hierarchy and constant relocation runs through Basgiath's war college.

Saara El-Arifi's Faebound draws on West African culture. Born in Abu Dhabi to a Ghanaian father and Sudanese mother and now based in the UK, she told Manchester Literature Festival audiences in 2025 that the creature Obeah — a large feline — grew from a childhood trek in Ghana, when she was told a leopard was watching the group.

Nikita Gill's Hekate, a reimagining of the Greek goddess of magic and crossroads, has darker roots: a childhood lived under heavy military presence in Kashmir and Northern Ireland. She asked what happens to a child — even a goddess — born at the end of a war, losing her parents to captivity. The story itself began with a 2019 dream and a walk that ended at an old graveyard.

For readers, this is more than trivia. If romantasy has you hooked, the genre practically writes your next trip: misty Skye hikes, Highland road trips, a night in the Alps, even Ghana's forests. You can literally stand in the scenery that shaped the books on your shelf — and with a new ACOTAR instalment arriving just in time for autumn reading, a moody Scottish escape has never been more on-brand.

Story via Condé Nast Traveller UK.