Here are 70 books that Fade fans have personally recommended if you like
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After devouring fantasy novels in my late teens and early twenties, I eventually hit a dead end. Where had all the good old-school fantasy gone? I wanted dashing heroes, compelling love stories, and epic battles between good and evil, but I could not seem to find it anymore–at least not as regularly as I wanted to. Eventually I set about writing my own stories, the kind of stories I always wanted to read. When I’m writing, I always go back to books on this list to rekindle my fire and remind me what good fantasy should be.
This novel features a strong protagonist, separated from his love by an evil emperor.
I love characters that aren’t just fighting for a good cause, but are fighting for love, and this series features a gripping love story. The characters find a way to beat impossible odds using wits, magic, and courage. It’s one of the few books I was excited to read more than once.
SOUL OF THE FIRE saw the political machinations that have dogged the midlands reach new heights as the Chimes ran free and threatened magic everywhere. As the novel ended Kahlan has narrowly avoided death and now she and Richard Rahl, the Seeker, must strive again to save the world from the resurgent armies of the Emperor Jagang. From the very first page FAITH OF THE FALLEN PITCHES Richard and Kahlan into their most desperate fight yet, a fight where worlds once again hang in the balance. Richard must embark on a course of action that will leave his people feeling…
Monsters and magic have always had a hook on me, ever since I was just a kid going through a stack of Stephen King paperbacks that I was definitely too young for my brother to have given me – not that many would call his work “fantasy” exactly, despite the amount of vampires ghosts and magic that say otherwise. Urban fantasy, blending those elements with the familiar world we know, is a particular favourite of mine. So much so, that I wrote my own! Granted, the urban area in question is 19th-century Paris, but I say that still counts.
This is high-caliber space fantasy in the realm of Star Wars or Dune. It brings together a grizzled holy warrior having doubts about his faith with a naïve and sheltered princess in a brutal world ruled by absolutely vile overlords. The perspective switches between the two of them. The warrior – Drin – grapples with whether the church’s mission to fight evil brings it to use methods too similar to the evil it fights. Meanwhile the princess – Anais – has to come to terms very quickly with the reality of life outside the palace when slavers invade her home and abduct her off-world.
After years of fighting for justice with his deadly nanotech, Templar Drin abandons his post, crash landing on a desert world controlled by a tyrannical alien empire. Its inhabitants are forced into slavery, broken where a once-proud race cultivated its lands.
For the first time in Drin's life, he has no backup, no support, none of his brothers.
He stands alone against evil.
Drin must face overwhelming odds to liberate millions of slaves from their captors and bring faith to a downtrodden world. But in his way stands the most dangerous…
Monsters and magic have always had a hook on me, ever since I was just a kid going through a stack of Stephen King paperbacks that I was definitely too young for my brother to have given me – not that many would call his work “fantasy” exactly, despite the amount of vampires ghosts and magic that say otherwise. Urban fantasy, blending those elements with the familiar world we know, is a particular favourite of mine. So much so, that I wrote my own! Granted, the urban area in question is 19th-century Paris, but I say that still counts.
This book and the next on the list are interesting in that the setting becomes a character in and of itself. The town of Haven seems to have its own character arc, as a post-apocalyptic settlement that has gone from a watchful last outpost of mankind to a more complacent community where things that had once been necessities are now rituals. The human characters are fleshed out just as well, coming across as very much normal and well-realized people.
Altogether Stutznegger builds not only a cast but also a setting where you really care about their continued well-being; especially as threats from the outside world begin to sneak into the town. I would consider this possibly “soft fantasy”, with the semi-mystical mystery of the main character’s enhanced eyesight and a technically sci-fi explanation for the villainous Shadow Elves.
Shadow and Bone meets A Quiet Place in this atmospheric and chilling dark fantasy debut.
"They wear the faces of your loved ones, but are more beautiful than you could ever imagine. Lovely things shouldn't draw you in and kill you. You almost want them to."
Seventeen-year-old Blue Haven, gifted with superhuman sight since birth, dreams of becoming a warrior—not that anything's happened near the wall since Old Man Amos was attacked by that beaver. The Shadow Elves—humans infected by a zombie apocalypse-like plague—have died out over the past 150 years, leaving life altogether boring. In her quiet farming village…
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing…
Monsters and magic have always had a hook on me, ever since I was just a kid going through a stack of Stephen King paperbacks that I was definitely too young for my brother to have given me – not that many would call his work “fantasy” exactly, despite the amount of vampires ghosts and magic that say otherwise. Urban fantasy, blending those elements with the familiar world we know, is a particular favourite of mine. So much so, that I wrote my own! Granted, the urban area in question is 19th-century Paris, but I say that still counts.
Superpowered people, living like the Amish, guarding the secret to eternal life. Like Blue Shadows Fall, this sets up a location so unique in the town of Edenia that it’s nearly a character by itself. Unlike that book, Edenia is less a place you’d want to live and more a mystery you want to unravel. This book really drills into the teenage frustration of having no control over your location or circumstances from some very different perspectives in the variety of POV characters. A lot of the story’s tension comes from the main cast’s refusal or inability to come clean with each other, but the underlying reasons for them to keep their secrets are very convincingly layered.
Award-winning YA Fantasy for fans of Good Omens and Cruel Prince
All that stands between the 6000 year old secret of immortality and the end of the world are the Guardians of the Garden.
Rejected by her family and her town, Miriam Miller wants nothing more than to turn her back on Edenia and forsake the new, invasive magic which makes her a Guardian of the Garden of Eden. In the outside world she could be free from the garden, free to lead her own life, and free to forget that she is a freak.
I grew up in an isolated rural pub in England. My love of folk horror was born of a strong nostalgia for that time and it has fed into both my writing and my reading. I understood isolation, small communities, the effect of strangers, as well as the sense of ‘otherness’ in the atmosphere of the countryside – the calm before the storm, the liminal twilight. It also meant that I could tell when a writer had captured the ‘essence’ of folk horror. When the author weaves a story between the landscape and man, blends traditions and mythology – they take me to that place I know.
I love the film The Wicker Man (released in 1973) and was delighted to discover this novelisation from its director and screenwriter.
Full of pagan religion and ritual sacrifice on remote Summerisle, it is wonderfully creepy. Nor is it a flat retelling of the film but an expansion of the character of poor Sergeant Howie. Set up by Lord Summerisle to be the May sacrifice, he is tormented and abused as he searches for a missing child and on film is shown as priggish and cold.
Yet in the book, he is brave, vulnerable, doggedly trying to do the right thing in the face of adversity. He also performs a touchingly heroic act at the end of the book even as he suffered - I admit to shedding a tear.
First published in 1978, five years after the release of the classic horror film from which it is adapted, The Wicker Man by director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, is a gripping horror classic.
A novelization of the haunting Anthony Shaffer script, which drew from David Pinner's Ritual, it is the tale of Highlands policeman, Police Sergeant Neil Howie, on the trail of a missing girl being lured to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle. As May Day approaches, strange, magical, shamanistic and erotic events erupt around him. He is convinced that the girl has been abducted for human…
As a student of mythology and archetypal psychology, I invite you to interrogate your assumptions about self and society, to consider the narratives that we all take for granted. We live between great polar opposites. One is how our leaders embody old, toxic stories. The other asks who we might become if we imagine new ones. But only by dropping our sense of innocence and acknowledging the depths of our darkness can we open ourselves to the possibilities of real transformation. I invite you inside our mythic walls, to examine what it means to be an American. I hope to facilitate a collective initiation and invite you to think mythologically.
This Black sociologist demands that we take a deep look into the religious basis of American racism.
Of 5,000 cases of lynching reported between 1880 and 1930, at least 40% functioned as actual human sacrifices, very large communal rituals that identified certain individuals as the source of the community’s problems and eliminated them. The sacrifice created a compact between the people and their deities, expiating their sins and reinforcing their values.
"The victim mediated between the sacred and the profane...the burning cross distilled it all: sacrificed Negro joined by the torch with sacrificed Christ, burnt together and discarded...” Well into the 20th century, “The cross – Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death – became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.” Forced to carry all the projections of the white unconscious, the Black man became the American Dionysus.
Patterson observes that in recent generations the stereotype of America’s internal…
In the first essay, Patterson analyzes the very latest survey data to delineate the different attitudes, behaviors, and circumstances of Afro-American men and women, dissecting both the external and internal causes for the great disparities he finds.In the second essay, Patterson focuses on the lynching of Afro-American boys and men during the decades after Reconstruction, particularly on the substantial number of cases that constituted apparent ritual human sacrifice. As no one has done before, Patterson reveals how the complex interplay between Christian sacrificial symbolism and the deep recesses of post-bellum Southern culture resulted in some of the most shameful, barbaric…
On Draakensky Windmill Estate, magick and mystery rule. Sketch artist Charlotte Knight is hired to live on the estate while illustrating poetry under the direction of the reclusive spinster, and wind witch, Jaa Morland—who believes in ghosts. Charlotte quickly encounters the voice…
As a young woman I became fascinated by what contributes to our uniqueness as human beings. I was intrigued by historical influences, the development of personality, and how we frequently travel life’s lanes through a labyrinth of conflicting thoughts and emotions. Feminism, spirituality, psychology; I was absorbed by all three. Eventually I studied psychology. My working life was spent in a variety of roles, mainly supporting adults or young people to manage the challenges thrown at them by circumstance. Regarding my writing, I have always penned something i.e., poetry, songs, holiday journals. I progressed to short stories for adults, which were self-published under a pseudonym. ‘Thistle’ is my first novel.
Micro-psychology by a brilliant storyteller, this was the first of Proulx’s books that I ever read, even though it was the last of the Wyoming trilogy. I went on to read the rest – and then more of her work.
Proulx draws me into the characters, their lives, the plot, setting, and atmosphere, using cleverly interpretative, and uniquely descriptive language. Just a few of her words and I am inside the story. I have been to Wyoming, taking the trilogy for company, although I had read them previously.
Some of her stories remain firmly fixed in my head, and I can re-read them without ever becoming bored.
The fantastic new collection of stories from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain. Fine Just The Way It Is marks Annie Proulx's return to the Wyoming of Brokeback Mountain and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known, from the native Indian tribes to the modern day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears. In 'A Family Man', an old man nearing the end of his life unburdens himself of the…
When I published Orphan, Agent, Prima, Pawn, in which Soviet-era psychological warfare plays a heavy role, I happily washed my hands of Russian intrigue and turned to more benign, pastoral inspirations – my life-long relationship with an idyllic cathedral town in Wiltshire, for example. Just days later, the world learned that a certain Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov shared my fondness for Salisbury’s “world-famous 123-metre spire,” the glories of which prompted their 72-hour visit from Moscow (and overlapped with the botched poisoning of a KGB defector living down the road). Since then, I find myself drawn to works that explore the interstices of morality, criminality, and great construction projects.
Another parable, another legend, another work of manual labour turned mystical. In this tale of a bridge-building gone wrong, Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare considers the harms and inevitabilities that come from spanning disparate cultures. This book features a human sacrifice at the altar of erection; it feels antique and yet timeless; it explores the boundaries of human endeavor. Notes the narrator, a silenced sceptic, “all great building works resemble crimes.” It is a recognisable concern from Kadare, an exile of Hoxha’s totalitarian regime.
In the Balkan Peninsula, history’s long-disputed bridge between Asia and Europe, the receding Byzantine empire has left behind a patchwork of warring peoples who fight over everything, from their pastures of sheep to the authorship of their countless legends.
One such gruesome tale declares that a castle under construction cannot be finished until a young mason’s bride has been walled up alive, one breast left exposed to suckle her growing infant even after her death. Myth becomes perverse reality when a mason is plastered into a bridge over a strategically important river, where his will not be the last human…
When I was younger, I turned to fantastical stories of determined, flawed heroes to bring me a world I could understand and control – unlike the scary reality I lived in. Most of the fantasy stories I read as I grew up were, of course, set in a medieval England-type world. But as I got older, I found myself fascinated by the history and mythology of the New World and got the feeling there was a lot of untapped potential there. So, I started studying Mesoamerican and Native American peoples, as well as picking up alternate history fantasies set in America. So of course, I had to write my own.
I love a noir detective story. Set that story in a fantastical, blood-drenched Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, and I’m totally sold.
The story follows Acatl, who is a high priest of the dead, as he, I kid you not, tries to solve what appears to be a murder case. Except he’s not walking the streets of some modern city – his journey takes him through the fascinating world of a familiar yet unique Aztec empire where human sacrifice is the only thing keeping the world spinning in its proper order.
Having familiar conflicts, including family issues, makes this one a unique standout. Acatl sounds like people I know. Following his determined efforts to bring a specific evil to heel – all while in a society that seemingly glories in bloodshed – is awesome.
The first book in the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy:
Year One-Knife, Tenochtitlan the capital of the Aztecs. Human sacrifice and the magic of the living blood are the only things keeping the sun in the sky and the earth fertile.
A Priestess disappears from an empty room drenched in blood. It should be a usual investigation for Acatl, High Priest of the Dead--except that his estranged brother is involved, and the the more he digs, the deeper he is drawn into the political and magical intrigues of noblemen, soldiers, and priests-and of the gods themselves...
The Valor of Valhalla series by Martin Kearns is a pulse-pounding dark urban fantasy trilogy that fuses the raw power of Norse mythology with the grit of modern warfare. Set in a world where ancient gods and mythical creatures clash with secret military organizations and rogue heroes, the series follows…
The list reflects my interest in history and my own recollections of the days before the current era of mass tourism and online globalisation. I confess to a feeling of painful nostalgia for a time when we all had a very different worldview, and these books are all of that period. They feature temporal grief for an age that has passed. They are all highly readable books by writers at the top of their game.
The best novel ever about WWI. I was there with them in the trenches and finally understood how the generals came to have the mentality that allowed the slaughter to continue.
Forester is a superb writer and grossly underrated. He is a model for any aspiring writer. I must have read it four times at least, and each time found some new aspect to enjoy.
The book John Kelly reads every time he gets a promotion to remind him of 'the perils of hubris, the pitfalls of patriotism and duty unaccompanied by critical thinking'
The most vivid, moving - and devastating - word-portrait of a World War One British commander ever written, here re-introduced by Max Hastings.
C.S. Forester's 1936 masterpiece follows Lt General Herbert Curzon, who fumbled a fortuitous early step on the path to glory in the Boer War. 1914 finds him an honourable, decent, brave and wholly unimaginative colonel. Survival through the early slaughters in which so many fellow-officers perished then brings…
