The Second Summer — Book 7 of The Last Route — releases 23 April 2026. Here’s what you can expect without any spoilers for the new book or the six that came before it.

Spring on the Route

Book 7 is a spring book — the third spring Wren has walked the route, and the first time it’s felt like hers rather than like a punishment.

The seasonal rotation is one of my favourite things about writing this series. Every book takes on the character of its season, and spring on the Last Route means thawing paths, returning birds, Rowan’s impossible garden coming back to life, and the route communities shaking off winter and looking outward again. There’s an energy to spring books that the autumn and winter entries don’t have — a sense of things beginning rather than settling.

This one needed that energy.

The Threat

For the first six books, the challenges Wren faces have been personal — her own bitterness, her isolation, learning to trust her magic and the people around her. In The Second Summer, the challenge comes from outside.

The Guild’s Route Optimization Committee has decided the Last Route might not be worth keeping. It’s remote, expensive to maintain, and serves a small number of communities. From a budget spreadsheet in Aldmere, it looks like a line item that could be cut.

From the route itself, it looks like something else entirely.

This is still cozy fantasy — the “villain” is a bureaucratic review, not a dark lord — but the stakes feel real because they threaten the thing Wren has spent six books building: her connection to the communities along the route. The people who wait for her. The places that have become home.

What It’s Really About

Without giving away how things unfold, I can say that The Second Summer is about what communities do when they’re asked to justify their own existence. It’s about the gap between how institutions measure value and how people experience it. And it’s about Wren realising that the thing she was assigned to as a dead-end posting has become the thing she’d fight to keep.

If the first phase of the series (Books 1–5) was about Wren finding reasons to stay, this book is the moment she stops needing reasons. She stays because this is where she belongs.

The Tagline

“Some things are worth fighting for. Others are worth waiting for.”

Both halves of that sentence matter in this book.

Where to Start If You’re New

Book 7 isn’t the place to jump in — the emotional payoff depends on knowing the route, the communities, and what Wren has been through. Start with Dead Letters (Book 1), where Wren arrives on the Last Route for the first time, thoroughly unimpressed. Six books will take you to this point, and at roughly 60,000 words each, they move fast.

Find the full series and reading order on the Last Route series page.

Release Details

The Second Summer (The Last Route, Book 7) releases 23 April 2026 on Kindle, paperback, and Audible. It’s available for preorder now.

The series continues with new books every couple of months after that. Twenty books total, covering twenty years of Wren’s life on the route.

Keep reading: Introducing The Last Route: Cozy Fantasy on the Move, Why I Wrote a 20-Book Sapphic Cozy Fantasy About a Postal Courier.

Want a free bonus story? Join the reader community and get Quills & Quiet — a Last Route short story — at heppesmithpublishing.com/thistle.

James Heppe-Smith is the author of The Last Route, a 20-book sapphic cozy fantasy series published by Heppe-Smith Publishing. The Second Summer is the first spring book that made him cry while writing it, which he considers a good sign.

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