100 books like Amatka

I love novels that evolve as I read them. I don’t want to feel I know exactly how a book will turn out from the first page. Give me the unknown and the mysterious, a strange setting and an otherworldly tone.

I also love novels with descriptive chapter titles. Piranesi satisfied all those impulses. The story begins by creating a deep, almost mythological atmosphere, which quickly reveals itself to be a mysterious epistolary, perhaps an ancient diary.

The unfolding mystery is intriguing, but the emerging and disturbing relationship between the novel’s two characters is the heart of the book. It drew me in by building a hidden history I could fall into, then slowly layering secrets and discoveries until masterfully revealing a devastating truth.

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.

Technically—very technically—this is the conclusion of a trilogy, but it’s more three standalone novels that have some things to say to, and about, each other.

The first book, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, was hugely influential on me as a reader and writer, and on speculative fiction as a field. This one, two decades later, is the most direct about the mutual imbrication, the bidirectional haunting, between our world and theirs.

Swanwick’s Dragon books do indeed feature dragons, except the iron dragons are mechanical, warplanes bonded to their human pilots, in a version of Faerie that has fully integrated vile modernity and knows our souls all too well. 

Death in Spring is a tiny book containing a bigger, more intricate world than many a doorstopper, for all that the whole story set in a small, nameless hamlet.

Life there too is made of strange, violent rituals, only not the ones we know. We follow a boy growing up and learning them, and being scarred by these mysteries—what do they fill the mouths of the dead with, before they are killed and put into a tree forever? (It’s cement.)

Rodoreda wrote in Catalan, and Tennent’s translation is fluid and beautiful.

Perfection is a rare thing; if you want to see what that looks like, here you go.   

In a post-apocalyptic world run by an oppressive American empire, we find Little Bird hiding in a hole. Though her mother was a great leader of the rebellion, Little Bird has found herself very lost, in a very cruel world - and she just might be the last chance that the freethinking people of the Western world have. 

I love that this story takes familiar forces and fears of our modern life and cranks them up to eleven. With that in mind, the star of the show must be Ian Bertram’s artwork. All the huge ideas and themes created by Darcy are elevated to a startling degree by the way Ian is able to build this world visually. The iconography, the violence, the characterizations, it slaps you in the face page after page.

Justin Cronin’s silky prose, captivating characters, and eye for detail elevates this post-apocalyptic literary thriller, making it a thoroughly engrossing read. 

The novel opens with the shocking suicide of a woman who lives in Prospera, a paradise island. But all is not as it seems in this lack-for-nothing dream world, and soon we learn that a rebellion of the underclass is brewing. When the protagonist discovers that all is not as it seems, he quickly finds himself a hunted man. 

I’m new to Cronin, but this book made me a fan.

The Ukraine crisis began in 2014 with the popular "Maidan" uprising that toppled the country’s pro-Russian president. Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula was followed by civil war and the takeover by pro-Russian rebels of Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Sakwa focuses on the international factors that exacerbated internal splits within Ukraine. Crucially, the crisis might have been avoided altogether if the United States, EU, and NATO had found a way to incorporate Russia into the post-Cold War order in Europe that emerged after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Packer examines why the United States invaded Iraq without a just cause and without a plan for what to do once it succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein. He explains the critical first few months of the war that set the course for everything that followed in a searing examination of America’s extraordinary hubris in the “War on Terror.” What sets Packer’s work apart is his ability to explain events in the White House and Pentagon and tie them to their bitter denouement on the streets of Baghdad. He tells the story of a big war of choice gone badly wrong before the first shots were fired. 

The Viper stalks at night. Esha the rebel’s highly trained assassin tasked with the murder of General Hotha and the undermining of King Vardaan’s rule. Kunal is an equally impressive soldier, the nephew of Hotha, and on the hunt for the Viper. When their paths cross, sparks fly, and loyalties are tested. 

Y.A. is ahead of general fantasy for representation, both of BIPOC and LGBTQA*. The Tiger at Midnight is heavily inspired by Hindu mythology and Indian cultures, bringing an incredible setting to an excellent Y.A. story. And the cover is absolutely stunning.

This is a great book written by an accomplished scholar later in his career and confident in his research and writing. Telling the tale of the uprising, and crushing, of Tomochic village, Vanderwood zooms into the smaller details of village life and pans out to nation-level decisions with remarkable panache. In a highly enjoyable way, he brings the reader into the action without omitting the broader historical relevance. The reader may enter this for the critique of the dictator’s late nineteenth-century armies, but they will keep reading to find the fate of the unfortunate “town son of a bitch.”