100 books like City of Saints and Madmen

New Crobuzon is a city as weird as its name sounds, inhabited by avian Garuda, cactus-skinned Cactacae, and the scarab beetle-headed Kephri, among many other fantastical creatures.

It’s a grimy city that if you squinted might just look a bit like Victorian-era London, albeit with more frog-people, airships, and statues crafted from harden spit. And at its center, the titular Perdido Street Station, a towering immense skyrail station, too large and labyrinthine to ever map out.

Miéville crafts a fantasy city unlike any other, plagued by government corruption, organized crime, and labor disputes, that makes New Crobuzon feel real and grounded, despite being one of the strangest cities ever put to ink.

Like a lot of people, I read The Great Gatsby in high school. I really loved it, which is why I was thrilled when one of my favorite authors did her own fantasy re-imaging of this classic.

The Chosen and the Beautiful is set in an alternate universe where magic flows as easily as champagne. It centers on Jordan Baker, a side character in the original book, and reimagines her as a Vietnamese orphan who was adopted as a baby into a wealthy white family.

I loved how this book managed to take a classic and cast it in a totally new light: it makes you think about who and what gets left out of the history books.   

I like Terry Pratchett’s fresh take on dragons. I’ve always appreciated his sense of humor, and his portrayal of little swamp dragons is hilarious! It cracked me up to read about little dragons like they are purebred lap dogs.

In this book, Sir Terry skillfully uses a big dragon as a metaphor, and I always love a good metaphor. Although I read it years ago, this book has stuck with me.

For a more traditional take on fantasy, Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is lovely and immersive, a fascinating new world worthy of Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe.

Reportedly, she created Olondria from a combination of regions in Turkey and North Africa, and it feels absolutely fresh and instantly powerful. A teenage merchant becomes haunted by the ghost of a young girl and must find a way to put her to rest.

But the story is really about the power of books and stories and language itself. It’s a love letter to adventure and open seas, harbors, and alleys, and snowy mountains in the distance.

Ms. Samatar holds several advanced degrees in language and literature, including Arabic and various African dialects, and you can feel the joy of her verbal artistry dancing on the page.

Stranger is not to be missed.

I adore Ead!! Unsurprisingly, that's why I’m including this book in my recommendations. One of three central characters (including my second favourite in this book – Sabran), Ead won me over because she’s just fantastically capable, but not showy about it at all. She’s the kind of person you’d love to have at your side through thick and thin. 

I got a little bit of a Robin Hobb vibe from this book which also made it a winner for me because I love all of Hobb’s work. This is a monster of a book (and it’s a standalone), but the pacing moves quite quickly despite the length and I never got stuck or felt like it bogged down in too much detail. The world building is fantastic and brings the story to life.

Qaanaak, Blackfish City’s floating Arctic city, is science-fictional—it’s maintained by artificial intelligence and other futuristic technology—but it’s built with all the world-building care the fantasy reader desires, including a text-within-a-text that explains the city’s origins. What most inspired me, though, is how Qaanaak exposes a city’s class structure, and questions what makes a city worth saving.

What if a city… but with bugs? Okay on paper a city full of giant sentient bugs seems weird, and well, it is, but once you accept the premise, it’s easy to get immersed in the dreamlike world Krohn paints.

Tainaron: Mail From Another City is an epistolary novel, that is, told only in letters by a human traveler to the city, and if you cut out the references to giant flowers and bug parades, it could be mistaken for non-fiction.

Unlike most fantasy novels, Tainaron is not plot focused, there’s no big villain to stop, no magical artifacts to destroy, just the tale of a woman out of place, and her musing on life, death, sorrow, and philosophy, as she spends a year trying to fit in a city literally not built for her.

Speaking of books that push up against the genre boundaries of fantasy, Bishop’s The Etched City crafts a dark, foreboding, but somehow one of the beautiful cities in fantasy.

Ashamoil is a grim place, decadent and decayed, a humid jungle-born city filled with disgraced freedom fighters, slavers, and crime lords. Its fantasy elements are less floating magic gemstones and dragons and more weird, inexplicable things, miracles, and their dark inverse.

At times The Etched City feels like a dream, but the best kind of dream, the one you want to tell everyone about, if you could just find the right words.

“What if?” That’s the question sci-fi and fantasy authors have been asking for over a hundred years. What if humanity was dying and aliens offered salvation, but only at a terrible price? That’s the question this book poses, and it does it so compellingly. The story’s set on a poisoned world, and in a dying race’s spaceship. There is no escape here except death. There are no familiar, comfortable spaces. Nowhere left to hide. There is only the smallest spark of hope: that the humans can somehow connect with the aliens who are “not squid” but absolutely not like us. To do so, they have to overcome the basest squeamishness of human nature, and that they do makes for not just brave characters, but an extremely brave book.

The “Cthulhu” in the title is a bit of a misnomer, since the big squid doesn’t actually make an appearance, but this anthology does collect some wonderful contemporary authors of Weird fiction exploring the autumn season. I love fiction that hints at the hidden world(s) behind our own, and these stories capture that immense and unsettling feeling of when the world’s disguises rot and fall away. You can open it to any page and find a gem, but my personal favorites include Laird Barron’s invocation of small-town bizarreness in “Andy Kaufman Creeping Through the Trees”; Nadia Bulkin’s election season meets haunted corn maze allegory “There Is a Bear in the Woods”; and Gemma Files’s archaeological horror “Grave Goods.”