40 books like Born of the Sun

I adored this book because it gives us a peek into the early life of Chinese Empress Wu. Weina Dai Randel did her homework, and her words absolutely blossomed in ancient China.

With an extremely sympathetic young protagonist who rises to be a force in the Emperor’s court, this book captivated me. I also remember it as being rather romantic in its way.

Fun fact: in college, my specialty was 16th-century Scotland, which meant I spent several months living in Edinburgh doing research for my senior thesis. In this book, Susanna Kearsley brings to life a Scotland we seldom see in novels but which brings back the Edinburgh I lived in and studied more vividly than anything else I’ve encountered.

There are so many books about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but this book tackles the precursor to all that, the tangled politics of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, from the fall-out of the Glorious Revolution and the exile of James II to the ferment around the 1707 Act of Union in all its glorious complexity, through the life of one woman who finds herself—as one does—a normal person buffeted by larger events. Every time I open this book, I feel like I’m back in Edinburgh again. 

The very name “Zanzibar” has a sort of magic to it—and I certainly fell under its spell when I read M.M. Kaye’s book for what would be the first of many, many times back in the 80s.

I had never heard of Zanzibar; I knew nothing of the ruling family, the Sayyids of Muscat and Oman, but by the time I was a hundred pages into M.M. Kaye’s epic story of an American woman who plunges into intrigues she thinks she understands but doesn’t, I felt I knew them all intimately. This book is a coming-of-age story, a brilliant evocation of place, and so much more.

I don’t know about you, but when I learned history in elementary school, we skipped straight from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Norman Conquest with the briefest of nods at Byzantium to acknowledge there was something in between. It was all very simple and straightforward—and completely left out the crumbling kingdoms left behind in the wake of the fall of Alexander the Great’s Empire.

I can still remember opening Gillian Bradshaw’s Horses of Heaven for the first time and thinking, “What’s Ferghana? Or Bactra?”  Gillian Bradshaw wrote a number of books set in the wake of Alexander’s empire, but this one is the one that really stuck with me, told through the eyes of a girl picked to go as attendant to a Greek aristocrat from Bactra being married to King Mauakes of Ferghana (now Afghanistan).

Not all indigenous languages have a corresponding alphabet or writing system. For example, many North American indigenous languages are now represented in a Romanized alphabet, but traditionally these languages were spoken and the stories they contained were transmitted by oral tradition.

In the case of my Taino ancestors, stories were also told with pictographs or petroglyphs. I conclude my list of indigenous futurist books with stories that are told graphically, in the form of Moonshot, a collection of comics edited, written, and illustrated by indigenous storytellers and artists.

Edited by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe & Métis) and Michael Sheyahshe (Oklahoma Caddo Nation), the imagery is striking, conjuring colorful mythoscapes and slipstream futures with indigenous people at the forefront, redefining science and technology along the way. One story features a protagonist in a wheelchair, raising questions about ableism in SF and the possibility for “Crip” Futures and Indigenous Futurism to be… show more.

One of the key characters in the Arthur legends is Guenevere, and nowhere does she become more real than in Parke Godwin’s Beloved Exile. In post-Roman Britain, after Arthur’s defeat by the Saxons, a mature and bereft Guenevere is taken captive by a Saxon thane. Keeping her identity secret, she struggles through life as a slave in her enemy’s household. Yet, in her soul, she is still a queen and cannot bear to see her nation torn by treachery and internal conflict. She becomes attached to the Saxon family she now serves and discovers that, in order to preserve Arthur’s legacy, she must make allies of her enemies.

Aelflet meet Cyr. Cyr, meet your match. I loved this spunky heroine immediately, her courage to stand up to a pushy knight had me cheering her on. And who doesn’t love a handsome, silver-haired knight who might have a reputation of being merciless but who proves to be the opposite. This D’Argent family has become part of mine and I hope you will invite them into yours as well.

Ok, so it’s a trilogy rather than a single book – an epic retelling of the legend of King Arthur and his knights – but what a trilogy! No one who’s read these books will forget what it feels like to have the life squeezed out of them at the centre of a shield wall, with spear-blades edging inexorably closer...

Like The King Must Die, The Warlord Chronicles recount a legend with so much verve and detail you’re left thinking this must be the way it really happened. Above all, it’s a moving study of heroes at the end of an age of heroes. However much they might be willing to die trying, not even the greatest warriors – or the greatest magicians – can stand against the tide of history. 

In my own writing I’ve recently ventured into the Anglo-Saxon period, so I know how hard it is to conjure the history of these early medieval centuries from the meagre source material that survives. Rory Naismith manages this brilliantly in his highly engaging history of London in the centuries between the end of Roman Britain and the Norman Conquest. Naismith’s earlier books are on coins and coinage, but he does not allow his specialism to pull the book off balance. It’s a comparatively short volume, but it provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging capital, and it wears its considerable learning lightly.

Sutcliff’s characters and stories are always believable—and show her amazing gift to always make her research invisible to the reader. All her works feed from actual history. She weaves a fragment or story from the past into a rich tapestry of the human experience and makes history live again. This tale shows her skills perfectly. Sutcliff uses as her source Y Gododdin, a period poem, to frame the construction of this coming-of-age story. Sutcliff takes the torch of the poem’s attempt to keep alive the memory of men who fought and died in a sixth-century British battle, comparable to that of the Battle of Thermopylae, to relight it through the eyes of Prosper, Sutcliff imagined British shield bearer. A witness to and one of the few to survive this unwinnable battle, Prosper sings a tale of The Shining Company who sacrificed their lives so others could live.