Ali Hazelwood Is Back With a New Audiobook, <em>Unbound,</em> and a New Movie—and She’s Just Getting Started

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Ali Hazelwood's Next Move: A 5,000-Year-Old Fashion Obsessive and the Messy Politics of Immortality

Ali Hazelwood is operating at a velocity that makes most authors look sluggish. Fresh off releasing six books in 2025 and with a film adaptation of The Love Hypothesis finally arriving this year, she's already pivoted to her next project: Unbound, an audiobook sequel to last year's Bound, dropping exclusively on Spotify July 14. The novella centers Lilit, a fashion-obsessed immortal who's been alive for five millennia and is currently entangled in a deliberately secret ten-year situation with Roman Martin, a pediatric ER doctor who has no idea what she is. When danger threatens them both, Lilit must untangle the brutal politics of her revenant world while keeping her mortal lover in the dark—a complication that gets messier by the chapter.

What sets Unbound apart is its perspective flip. Bound tracked a human discovering the immortal underworld; Unbound reverses it, letting readers experience the chaos through an immortal's eyes as she tries to explain her genuinely weird existence to someone mortal and decidedly fragile. The audiobook, narrated by Tara Fatehi and Dean Miller, arrives with Spotify's new Follow Along feature—custom art by cover artist Lilith floating throughout the story for added immersion. In interviews, Hazelwood revealed she hadn't even finished Bound before realizing Viktor's maker deserved her own narrative. A quick email to her agent confirmed Spotify would greenlight a sequel, and Hazelwood started writing in January. Things move fast in audiobook publishing.

Lilit's most distinctive trait isn't her immortality—it's her absolute commitment to looking incredible. She's heeled through nearly the entire book, a sartorial choice Hazelwood envisioned as pure confidence and grace. When asked about specific fashion references, Hazelwood admitted she mostly shops at Old Navy and isn't particularly clothes-forward herself. But she imagined Lilit with an incomparable vintage collection: original Chanel from Coco Chanel's era, pieces accumulated across five thousand years of impeccable taste. The heels, naturally, are killer stilettos—the kind only someone with five millennia of practice could wear without breaking an ankle.

The novella also wrestles with tension around aging and perceived youth. Older revenants hold more power; Lilit remains frozen at 21, forever underestimated despite her accumulated knowledge. Roman, 35 and aging normally, grows curious about her unchanging appearance. While Hazelwood doesn't claim deep aging anxiety, she's candid about time anxiety—the academic-bred conviction that every moment spent not working is a moment wasted. That pressure fuels Unbound's exploration of what happens when the world assumes you're inexperienced simply because you look young, even as you've witnessed more history than anyone around you.

Hazelwood's five-year publishing anniversary arrives in September, and her backlog of unwritten ideas is staggering. She wants to write CeCe's story next—the roommate from Love, Theoretically—and she's eyeing historical romance set in Italian history, possibly the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages. She's also collaborating with author Adriana Herrera on a deluxe Kickstarter repackaging of beloved historical romances, launching May 12. For someone perpetually wrestling with the feeling she should be doing more, Hazelwood's already doing plenty—and Unbound proves immortals and mortals aren't the only things colliding in her fiction; it's ambition and actual output, accelerating at audiobook speed.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.