The Silver Kingdom

Crown Prince Zayd of Dakaria is on a warship at night, shooting pirates off the Silver Port, when a royal scroll summons him home: his father is dying and his mother has chosen him a bride. A border away, Princess Layla of Sawan throws daggers at a dartboard and imagines her mother’s face on it, then learns at a council meeting that she will marry a prince of Fallowmere, the empire that once ruled them all. Back in her rooms her palms glow orange and leave a scorch mark on an armchair. The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza sets both pieces on the board in its first two chapters, and the game is which secret breaks first.

How It Works

Sawan, Dakaria and Valthar were once a single country, carved up by Fallowmere colonists and freed by a revolt about a century ago. The occupiers left behind ruined economies and a terror of mages, people born with an affinity for fire, earth, water or wind that wakes at eighteen. Most were killed. The survivors hide.

Dakaria has just struck silver, and silver channels magic, so every pirate and neighbour wants it. Sawan is ruled by Layla’s mother, Sultana Zahra, a regent who whips suspected mages in the palace dungeons and makes her daughter watch. Layla turns eighteen in under three months, and she is very obviously a fire mage.

Zayd has his own clock. An arrow taken while dragging his reckless younger brother off a ship carries a dark-magic poison, and the only cure is the tears of an earth mage, a person who may no longer exist. To protect the port he strikes a bargain with the last family of water mages, whose chief agrees to help on one strange condition about Layla. The chapters alternate between the two heirs in first person, so the reader holds both secrets while each of them holds only one.

What The Silver Kingdom Is Really Building

The engine of The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza is dramatic irony. Layla thinks Zayd is an arrogant flirt with a sore arm. Zayd thinks Layla is a lonely, sharp-tongued girl who might be useful to his kingdom. Each is hiding something that would get them killed or deposed, and Hafiza lets every friendly gesture carry a second meaning the other person cannot see. The romance is slow burn, but it is a slow burn with a fuse.

Around it sits a political plot with real numbers in it. Sawan demands a fifty per cent discount on Dakarian silver, Valthar has been promised twenty in exchange for soldiers, and Zayd’s own wedding is a military alliance dressed in jewels. Layla’s mother, meanwhile, is quietly courting the old colonisers. In The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza marriages are treaties, and the book never lets the love story forget it.

What works

• The banter. Their first meeting ends with a dagger at her throat and her knee in his groin, and the insults never quite stop. The sparring ring, where Layla beats Yunus twice and then ends a bout with Zayd by fighting dirty, is the best scene of attraction in the book.
• Yunus. The spare prince who knits his dying father a hat and longs to be sent to the front is funny, wounded and the most quietly developed character here. His growth over the second half is a genuine pleasure.
• The texture. A hammam of turmeric and rose petals, a game of gillidanda on the palace lawn, haldi and mehendi ceremonies before a royal wedding. The South Asian detail is lived in rather than decorative, and The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza is better for it.
• The late run. The final fifteen chapters stack reveals fast, and most of them were fairly planted.

Where The Silver Kingdom Gives Ground

• The same near-kiss, again. Balcony, bedroom, greenhouse: the leads lean in and a servant arrives with tea, or a guard clears his throat. Once is charming. By the third time it is a formula, and the romance leans on almost-moments where a few honest conversations would have done more.
• Villains with one setting. Zahra is cruel in every scene she appears in, and the Fallowmere royals are colonial caricatures from their first line. The anger behind them is earned, but the characters themselves never surprise, which drains some menace from the politics.
• Magic told more than shown. Much of the mage lore arrives through library books Layla smuggles to her room, and the rules stay vaguer than the political arithmetic. For a book named after a magic metal, the magic system is the least developed piece.

Where This Series Starts

The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza is book one, so no earlier reading is needed:

1. The Silver Kingdom (2026)
2. Untitled sequel, not yet announced

Be warned that the last chapters open a war and close on several threads at once. Readers who prefer to binge may want to wait for the second volume.

Read These Next

If The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza leaves you wanting more South Asian-inspired YA fantasy:

1. For She Is Wrath by Emily Varga, a revenge fantasy drawn from Indian epic, with a heroine just as furious.
2. Heir by Sabaa Tahir, for another empire’s aftermath told through young people inheriting its damage.
3. This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi, a Persian-inspired romance between a hidden magical girl and the prince who should hunt her.
4. We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal, for a dual-POV quest where duty and desire pull in opposite directions.

For more on the patterns this book plays with, see our guide to young adult book tropes.

About Radiya Hafiza

Radiya Hafiza made her name with illustrated fairy tales for younger readers, and The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza is her first novel for teenagers. In her author’s letter she explains that the political framing grew from her parents’ memories of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, which gives the book’s talk of revolts and occupiers a family weight.

• Earlier books: Rumaysa: A Fairytale (2021) and Rumaysa: Ever After (2022), middle-grade titles from Macmillan Children’s Books illustrated by Rhaida El Touny
• First published in the UK by Simon & Schuster Children’s on 4 June 2026
• The US edition from Salaam Reads, a Simon & Schuster imprint, is out on 3 November 2026
• The illustrated map of the three kingdoms is by Naina Lamba

Worth Your Shelf

This is a first YA novel with a clear voice and a real argument about who owns a country’s wealth after the colonisers leave. The Silver Kingdom by Radiya Hafiza is funniest when its heirs are trading insults and sharpest when the dinner-table diplomacy turns cold. The repeated near-kisses and flat villains hold it back, and the ending is a hook rather than a resolution. Still, readers who fall for Zayd and Layla will be counting the days to book two.

Silver buys armies. It cannot buy the truth.