It's been several months since Lauren Kate dropped some major news: her next book, White Lights, is finally coming. Kicking off a brand-new series that is all about angels, it is the perfect book for those of us who were raised on the iconic Fallen series. And, even better? It's actually her adult romantasy debut. Basically, she truly wrote this for us! Luckily, we've received a divine gift as we finally get a sneak peek at what's to come in this brand new trilogy that we'll no doubt be obsessed with.
Cosmopolitan has an exclusive first look at White Lights by Lauren Kate, set to be released on June 9, 2026. The novel follows Rafe as he uncovers something world-changing: a new angel of death must be found. This forces him to cross paths with Desdemona AKA Dez, where her only escape from what she's running from may be the very thing that leads her to something greater than herself. Here's some info from our friends at Grand Central Publishing:
#1 New York Times bestselling author Lauren Kate, who’s Fallen series has sold over 11million copies of her novels around the world, is returning to the romantasy world of angels that's perfect for Fallen fans and new readers alike.
This is a stunning one-printing deluxe edition with:
- Stenciled Edges
- Illustrated Case
- Designed Endpapers
- Metallic Jacket
When mysterious Rafe de la Cruz rolls into Desdemona’s life to recruit her to the elite film school Acheron, Dez has no reason to trust him—and no other option. A violent attack has just put her brother in the hospital…and Dez is the only suspect. Guilt-ridden and grieving, she finds herself running from the law to chase her longtime dream of making movies, at a school she’s never heard of. Soon, she’s dropped into Acheron’s cutthroat world of seductive intrigue, power on an otherworldly scale, and deadly competition.
Acheron may seem like the ticket to a future Dez has always wanted, but as she delves deeper into the secret work being done there, she finds herself trapped in an existential conflict on a cosmic scale—with more than her heart on the line.
While we're not heading over to Acheron just yet, we are showing off the stunning new cover and special features that you can get with the book's deluxe edition that will make the perfect addition to your shelf! Check out the cover for White Lights along with the end pages, back case, and sprayed edges below:
And you're going to thank the heavens, because we also have an exclusive excerpt that you check out below! Just make sure to pre-order White Lights and check out some of Lauren Kate's other reads to fill in the time before it comes out!
An Excerpt From White Lights
By Lauren Kate
The last thing Rafe needs today is a gorgeous girl pointing a video camera at him. Well, not at him, exactly. She’s capturing the scene: the crowded pier, sunlight glinting off the ocean, seagulls mimicking angels above Ventura Beach.
Angels mimicking humans, strolling down the pier . . .
If someone were to write a book about Rafe’s weaknesses, this woman might as well be on the cover—and on every other page. And sure, titillation is a dime a dozen in this world, and Rafe is a well-resourced guy . . . but sparks like her are rare. It almost hurts to look at her, but Rafe can’t make himself stop.
She’s setting up a shot like it’s a matter of life and death. He watches her look through the viewfinder, slide her tripod up and down with slender fingers. He likes her chipped nail polish, which he feels suggests a complex mind. He could lose himself in her dark, wind-tangled hair, worn loose down to her waist. The curves of her shoulders remind him of the Sicilian shoreline. And that stern expression? He’d love to use his mouth to melt it off her pretty face, if only everything were different . . .
Alas.
He’s late to meet Sam. He feels this internally, without any watch. Even after all these years, meeting his mentor makes Rafe tremble. Sam doesn’t like to wait.
Rafe heads up the pier, toward the ragged, beachfront seafood shack Sam chose for their meeting place. When he draws near the woman, Rafe clenches his jaw, smiles with his eyes. What’s more natural than posing for a camera?
But right as he’s about to pass her, about to place her in the world-class museum of his mind, the woman looks up from her camera. And directly at him.
It stops Rafe in his tracks. A river of warmth winds through him. Damn if it hasn’t been a while.
But here it is: chemistry. Sudden. Soul-affirming.
And absolutely impossible.
The woman seems as stunned as Rafe. She looks back into her viewfinder. Where she can’t see him, where human-made technology won’t pick up any trace of him.
She furrows her brow in disbelief. Rafe’s heart begins to pound. By the time she raises her eyes again, he’s gone.
“Hey,” a voice calls out.
No way she’s talking to him. No way she even saw him. Mortals can’t see Rafe’s kind. For good reason.
No, what he’d taken for eye contact—for chemistry—was only an illusion.
Rafe doesn’t let himself look back. He hurries up the rotting plywood stairs and through the swinging saloon doors of the restaurant. He’s out of breath when he slides into the wood-paneled booth across from Sam. And then the sight of his old friend sends the bombshell on the pier light-years from Rafe’s mind.
“Salutations,” Sam says, not looking up from the napkin where he’s sketching something with a pen. “I was starting to think you had better things to do.”
Sam is wearing jeans and a ripped black T-shirt, a gray baseball hat slung low over curly russet hair. He looks the same yet is completely different than Rafe has ever known him to be. Something unseen has shifted.
“What happened to you?” Rafe asks.
“I wanted you to be the first to know,” Sam says, holding out his arms. “I’m done.”
A fearful abyss opens in Rafe. He speaks carefully. “What do you mean, done?”
“You know what I mean,” Sam says, resuming his sketch. “I’m free.”
Rafe has never known Sam to lie, but what he’s saying now is insane. If it’s true—it can’t be true, but if it is—it changes everything.
“Aren’t you going to ask, ‘What happens now?’ ” Sam says.
Rafe looks around the restaurant, at the other diners digging into fish and chips, oblivious to the enormous event unfolding in their midst. A development that will touch every single destiny on earth. What must it be like to be them, so ignorant of cosmos, how desperately fragile it is?
“All right,” Rafe says to Sam, a tremor in his voice. “What happens now?”
“That’s someone else’s problem. Play your cards right, and it could be yours.”
A surge of hunger, of hope, lights through Rafe. Is this the moment he’ll look back on? The moment when he was finally given the chance to redeem himself?
“Are you . . . offering it to me?”
The Crimson Pinion. The single red feather Sam bore in his wings for the last six millennia. The totem that elevates an angel to a seraph, enabling him and him alone to preside over death.
Where is it now? Is Sam about to—
“Rafael.” Sam frowns. “You know I can’t.” The mercy in his voice makes Rafe feel nauseous. “You have to earn it. Hell, the way things are, you may have to seize it. With both hands.” He looks down at his napkin, the sketch. “Of course, the others will want it, too.”
Rafe’s fists tighten. “Who else knows?”
“You’re the first. I owe you that much at least.”
“I don’t understand. You’re a dead man walking?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.”
“But, Samael, why?”
Sam settles back against the booth and smiles. “I’ll show you.”
A waitress approaches. She’s thirty-seven and two-thirds if Rafe had to guess, with good bones and tired eyes, chewing faintly scented grape gum. When she faces Sam like he’s any other customer, Rafe breaks out in a sweat. She can see him.
The motherfucker isn’t lying.
“What can I get you, sugar?”
Sugar. She’s talking to him. To Samael, the Angel of Death. Former Angel of Death.
Rafe’s oldest friend, his mentor, has gone mortal. Has actually, honestly, given it all up. Rafe can’t believe it.
Sam gives Rafe a watch this look, then cocks his head toward the waitress.
“Heaven must be running out of angels if you’re down here.”
“Oh God,” the waitress groans. “Nobody wanted that.”
Sam straightens his spine with an earnestness that horrifies Rafe. “Let me try again—”
“Please, no,” the waitress says, treating Sam like any random nobody hitting on her. “You want coffee or what?”
“Coffee,” Sam says, delighted. “My friend will have one, too.”
The waitress glances across the booth, in Rafe’s direction, but not at Rafe. And the blankness he feels under her unfocused gaze makes him think of the woman on the pier. The way it seemed like she saw him. How that had felt inside.
He pushes her out of his mind to focus on Sam, this news, and its shattering implications. Rafe must use this advantage. He must take control. He can’t fuck it up this time.
Seize it, Sam said. Sam who looks so content now having just made a fool of himself with a waitress. If it were anyone else, Rafe wouldn’t be curious, but this is Sam.
“Help me understand,” Rafe says. “You . . . retired so you could hit on waitresses?”
Sam shakes his head. “Good old Rafe. No one else can make the transcendently profound sound so infinitesimally small.”
“It’s just, there’s no shortage of sex in—”
“It’s not about sex.”
Rafe blinks.
“Love, asshole. I want love.”
Rafe scoffs. “No one gives up what you had for love.”
Sam sketches, says nothing.
“Right. Where do you intend to find this . . . love?”
“Could be this librarian I just met,” Sam says. “I walked in for a book of Byron’s plays. I walked out with Adah. Astonishing. The unspeakable softness.”
“Yet you’re hitting on the waitress?”
“All mortal women carry a spark of the divine in them. Once you’ve experienced it, it becomes addictive.”
“It sounds to me like all you’ve done is replace one object of devotion with another,” Rafe says, hearing the blasphemy in his own words.
“And I’m telling you,” Sam says, smiling, fearless, “it’s an upgrade.”
“How long has it been?” Rafe manages to say.
“Three nights. Already everything has changed. You should hear the sound of Adah’s laughter, Rafe. Like a nightingale. We stay up all night talking, make love at sunrise in her backyard under the lemon tree. She’s giving me surfing lessons! I’m starting to think maybe one day I can see myself as a dad—”
“You’ve been gone three nights? That’s four hundred and fifty thousand souls—”
“I can do the math. I just don’t have to anymore.”
“Why didn’t I sense it? Why didn’t I know?”
“You know now. I’m telling you.”
“Three nights. And no one’s noticed?” Rafe whispers. It’s unfathomable. Suddenly impatient, he grabs the napkin from under Sam’s pen. “What are you drawing?”
“Her.” Sam points out the window at the woman with the camera. Rafe feels a wild pulse of jealousy. He studies her likeness on the napkin, the careless lines his mentor has just made. He never knew Sam could draw, but he’s captured something essential about her that makes Rafe want to steal the napkin, to stare at it for centuries.
“Why are you sketching her?”
“For future reference,” Sam says. “She’s talented. Seems like she could use a mentor. And maybe it’s time you thought about paying it forward? To a young filmmaker who could use a leg up?”
Rafe grips the edge of the table. Moments ago, he’d convinced himself the woman with the camera was mere eye candy. Now her proximity, her existence feels threatening.
Had she really seen him out there on the pier? No.
“You know what I want,” Rafe says. “I have wanted it for a long time. You’re telling me suddenly it’s within reach. The last thing I need is games.”
The corner of Sam’s mouth tips up. “There are the things we say we want, and the things we think we want. And then there are the things we really want,” he says. “If you want this, Rafe, you need a protégé.”
“I work with you.”
“Worked with me,” Sam says. “Now it’s graduation day. Time for the pupil to become the iris.”
“No,” Rafe says. “I’ll work alone.”
“We can learn from them, you know,” Sam says, taking back the napkin to continue his sketch. “You’ve been aboveground too long. Away from the soul of things.”
“And you’re the expert? Three nights with a librarian and you’ve figured it all out?”
“I’ve heard it said,” Sam says, staring past Rafe, “that when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. I want my flash to be a good one. Something beautiful, you know?”
“Tell me what to do,” Rafe says.
Sam levels a familiar gaze, imbued with old and absolute power. “Keep my secret as long as you can. In the meantime, look for advantages.” He nods at the woman on the pier. “That could be one.”
“She is not an advantage.”
Sam lifts a shoulder casually. “When the teacher is ready, the student will come. I think that’s how the saying goes.”
“Here’s your coffee, cutie,” the waitress says, setting down a steaming cup in front of Sam. “And one for your friend. Hope he shows up before it gets cold.”
Excerpted from WHITE LIGHTS by Lauren Kate. Copyright © 2026 by Lauren Kate. Reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
White Lights, by Lauren Kate will be released on June 9, 2026 from Grand Central Publishing. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
AMAZON AUDIBLE BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS-A-MILLION BOOKSHOP APPLE BOOKS KOBO LIBRO.FM TARGET WALMART POWELL'S BOOKS HUDSON BOOKSELLERS GOOGLE PLAY EBOOKS.COM
