100 books like By Force Alone

Game of Thrones, right? This author has created so many characters that fit this category, and they all handle their situations in a different manner. I love the three major ones, Arya Stark, Sansa Stark, and Daenerys Targaryen, who could not be more different from each other. Sansa and Arya have grown up in privilege, but one scheme to be a pampered lady, and the other would be happy sleeping in the kennel with her dire wolf.

Daenerys has been hidden much of her childhood to protect her, and suddenly, she is thrown into the game with her arranged marriage to a wild horse lord, where she grows up very fast in order to survive. Sadly, as women in Westeros, they do not control their own fates, and following how their lives evolve and intertwine is fascinating.

The first volume of a series that eventually ran to three books. It opens with the main character, Ted, caught in an explosion out among the prairie oil rigs and badly shaken up when he faces a Norse fire god who announces he is about to burn the world. Ted wants his old life back, but now the creatures of Norse myology stalk among us.

If you think you might enjoy the characters from Norse mythology in a gritty modern mid-Canada setting, this one is for you. Described as a serious fantasy for grownups. I have to admit I ended up buying all three books as they became available.

Ever read a book you kept putting aside because you wanted to extend the pleasure a bit longer? I didn’t want to set this down. Ready to submit my five picks when I came across this tale. Delicious! By the time I’d finished it replaced one of my choices. Treachery, deceit, blood, with vivid characters you might wish to meet, at a safe distance.

A fantasy world obviously based on the Norse and Byzantium; you are swept away on an adventure. Do you like vivid duel and battle scenes where you can feel every blow? How about devious work behind the scenes? Whom do you trust? Yes, there is even a tinge of romance, and the ladies get more than their equal share of top billing.

This one gets a content warning too: Black Leopard, Red Wolf is decidedly not a children’s book. It contains graphic depictions of violence, sex, and rape. 

But the worldbuilding—my god, the worldbuilding. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is an African fantasy set before Europeans intrude, and there’s very little that feels “Western” about the story. The monsters are distinct (roof-walkers who stalk you from the ceiling, lightning vampires whose thralls crave their master’s charged blood, men who mutated themselves into spiders, and many more). The societies function according to different rules. The magic works in intriguing ways.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf also offers an unorthodox mystery to unravel. And while the voice lost me on occasion, there’s a messy genius here I’m glad I engaged with.

More than any other source, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book is responsible for our modern fascination with King Arthur. I read this for the first time at school and have returned to it again and again.

Written in Latin in the twelfth century, Monmouth claimed to have access to secret books that no other author had read–I found that intriguing all by itself. When he wrote, three of his exact contemporaries were also writing works on King Arthur, and there seems to have been a literary ‘Arthur business’ in the 1130s–why? (It was a period of great disruption in England, and she may have needed a new savior!). Although he goes way beyond the realms of history, I still find Geoffrey charming and inspiring.

Britain After Rome is the best account of what it was like to live in Britain in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. Vividly recreating ordinary people’s lived experiences, Fleming mines the archaeological and material record to illuminate the non-political changes that transformed Roman Britain into the Britain of 1066. While plenty of books focus on the activities of kings and bishops in those centuries, Fleming’s engaging and erudite survey tells the history of everyone.

By using a balance of primary sources and archaeological discoveries, this book provides a detailed overview of Anglo-Saxon history, presented in a very readable way.

But what truly makes this book stand out is the colour and black-and-white images that decorate almost every page. These images provide an intimate view of Anglo-Saxon life, art, and religion that mere words can never achieve. 

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.

To my mind, James Campbell was the greatest commentator on early Anglo-Saxon England of the last sixty years.

He was my tutor at Oxford for a course on early Anglo-Saxon history and archaeology, and he inspired me to recognise just how much of the so-called “Dark Ages” can be brought to light via a combination of rigour in analysis and creativity in reconstruction.

Campbell’s seminal articles on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, included in this edited collection, transformed Bedan studies and set out the path forward for the next generation of scholars, although much more remains to be done – particularly in connection with identifying Bede’s sources and unpacking the chronology of the composition of his History.

If you want to understand the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England, you need to understand Bede’s Ecclesiastical History; and if you want to understand Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, you have to understand Bede. The quest will… show more.

Mathew Harffy has a lot going for him in the historical fiction world. His fight scenes are not overly technical and are easy to follow. They have just the right amount of blood and gore to make you believe the characters are really in danger but are not simply gratuitous violence. What I really love about this book is his voice when he writes descriptions of the forest and the people who live in it. I grew up in the woods of a small town in Canada, and I know how the forest can be a peaceful, tranquil setting one moment and then suddenly transform into a place of shadows and dread. Judging by the cover of this book, I think Harffy knows this as well.