Move over Oasis – 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets to a masquerade ball to celebrate the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, while specialist bookshops catering for the genre report huge sales

When The Spicy Librarian, a romance bookshop in Leamington Spa, announced a masquerade ball to celebrate the new Sarah J Maas novel, 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets. “We sold out within 13 minutes,” says the shop’s co-founder Ali Maynard James. “As soon as tickets went on sale, our website crashed”.

The shop was one of many across the UK marking the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, the first instalment of Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series in more than five years. On Monday night, bookshops threw parties and opened past midnight – and The Spicy Librarian hired a stately home to mark the occasion.

Between enemies-to-lovers and ‘shadow daddies’, BookTok has fallen in love with the spicy stories combining romance and fantasy. But there is more to the subgenre than sex, say the fans who queued for hours outside the brick-and-mortar Oxford store

‘We left Warrington at 5.15am this morning to get here,” Emma tells me, standing in a queue that stretches down Walton Street. It is just after 9am on a Saturday in Oxford, the students are still in bed and the tourists have yet to descend on the city, but this corner of Jericho is already buzzing.

Oxford is rarely short of literary pilgrims. Every year, visitors flock to the colleges and libraries that shaped writers including JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Iris Murdoch. But this crowd is here for something a little different. Instead of queueing for the Bodleian, they’re swapping recommendations for dragon riders and faerie kingdoms. Women clutch tote bags emblazoned with quotes like “hot girls read smut”, and compare their favourite “morally grey” heroes.