Here are 37 books that In Legend Born fans have personally recommended if you like
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While I love a good romance, I was disappointed to discover how few novels are written about friendship. In so many books, friends take a backseat to the love interest, or to the plot; it’s hard, outside of fiction aimed at children, to find stories that treat friendship as pivotal to a character’s life as friendship usually is in normal life. I love stories that show us what that kind of friendship looks like, and how it can matter… which is why I write them.
Not all siblings end up friends, and the evil brother who wants to steal the throne or the catty sister who wants to steal the boy are cliché staples of the genre. That’s what made Summers at Castle Auburn so refreshing: Corie and her half-sister, Elisandra, love and are loyal to one another throughout the whole book, and their relationship sustains the characters through their adventure and to the happy ending.
A woman blessed, or cursed, with a talent for witchcraft returns to Castle Auburn where she spent her childhood in joy-only to find an aura of dread awaiting her.
While I love a good romance, I was disappointed to discover how few novels are written about friendship. In so many books, friends take a backseat to the love interest, or to the plot; it’s hard, outside of fiction aimed at children, to find stories that treat friendship as pivotal to a character’s life as friendship usually is in normal life. I love stories that show us what that kind of friendship looks like, and how it can matter… which is why I write them.
Harrier, son of a harbormaster, and Tiercel, nobleman’s son, make for exactly the kind of friendship you often see in real life, where one of the pair’s a dreamer and the other a pragmatist, and they need one another for balance. Their friendship remains central to all three books of this series, keeping them sane as they take on an impossible world-saving task.
New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory teamed up to write The Obsidian Trilogy, set in a wondrous world filled with magical beings, competing magic systems, and a titanic struggle between good and evil.
That world proved so popular with the creators and readers alike that Lackey and Mallory have returned to it with The Phoenix Unchained, Book One of The Enduring Flame, the opening volume of a new epic fantasy trilogy. After a thousand years of peace, much Magick has faded from the world. The Elves live far from humankind. There are no…
While I love a good romance, I was disappointed to discover how few novels are written about friendship. In so many books, friends take a backseat to the love interest, or to the plot; it’s hard, outside of fiction aimed at children, to find stories that treat friendship as pivotal to a character’s life as friendship usually is in normal life. I love stories that show us what that kind of friendship looks like, and how it can matter… which is why I write them.
The War God series follows the development of an unlikely orc-analog paladin, Bahzell, which would be entertainment enough: but Bahzell’s best friend, a would-be quasi-orc bard, Brandark, remains his steadfast companion throughout all his unlikely adventures. The best part of their relationship is definitely their communication: via humorous barbs and perfectly timed silences. Sheer fun!
Whom the gods would recruit, they first tick off...our hero: the unlikely paladin, Bahzell Bahnakson of the Horse Stealer, Hradani. He's no knight in shining armour. He's a hradani, a race known for their uncontrollable rages, bloodthirsty tendencies, and inability to maintain civilized conduct. None of the other Five Races of man are like the hradani. Besides his ethnic burden, Bahzell has problems of his own to deal with: a violated hostage bond, a vengeful prince, a price on his head. He doesn't want to mess with anybody else's problems, let alone a god's, let alone the War God's! So,…
An ambitious orphan. A ruthless warlord. An impossible destiny.
Arya Nameless is a lowly Raider posted to an isolated fort in the most dangerous place in Dunidaen. She has few prospects, and as much as she loves her fellow soldiers, she burns for more—more control, more autonomy, more power.
When…
While I love a good romance, I was disappointed to discover how few novels are written about friendship. In so many books, friends take a backseat to the love interest, or to the plot; it’s hard, outside of fiction aimed at children, to find stories that treat friendship as pivotal to a character’s life as friendship usually is in normal life. I love stories that show us what that kind of friendship looks like, and how it can matter… which is why I write them.
Am I recommending a Star Trek book? And yet, this (questionably canonical) novel is more about two original characters, a human woman and the Vulcan, and tells the story of their unlikely friendship as flashbacks during their difficult captivity as hostages. A fantastic first contact story, as well as a powerful depiction of friendship in duress.
DWELLERS IN THE CRUCIBLE Warrantors of Peace: the Federation's daring experiment to prevent war among its members. each Warrantor, man or woman is hostage for the government of his native world -- and is instantly killed if that world breaks the peace. Now Romulans have kidnapped six Warrantors, to foment political chaos -- and then civil war -- within the Federation. Captain Kirk must send Sulu to infiltrate Romulan territory, find the hostages, and bring them back alive -- before the Federation self-destructs!
I have an amazing daughter in my life, and I want there to be more books for her to read that feature strong, admirable, and good women in leading roles. That’s one of the things I keep an eye out for in the books I read as well as the books I write.
This one is a long, very long, fantasy epic, so be warned! Despite the length of the work, it ended up being an incredible read. Trin is one of the main characters the story follows. She’s a young woman who ‘accidentally’ unleashed a curse that has doomed the world to a future of death and destruction, and she’s desperately seeking a way to break this curse. In so doing, she gets caught up in an ancient blood feud between gods and full-blown war between mighty empires.
1200 Pages of Epic Fantasy that reviewers are comparing to Malazan and Wheel of Time.
War between gods. Mortals are pawns. Fate lays a curse to bring Death to the world. A boy makes a list of people to kill. What could go wrong?
Jem just killed his father. He should have done it five years ago, but kids don't always make good decisions. Next on Jem's list is a military tyrant. Maybe the whole Legion. With so many people to kill, Jem hopes to satisfy his hunger for vengeance... and obtain redemption too.
As I write in Fight Songs, my name has nothing to do with it: It refers to a geography an ocean away, and predates any notion of the American South (or of America, for that matter). I have spent most of my life in the South, though, loving football, basketball, and other sports that didn’t always love me back. I became curious about why they’ve come to play such an outsized role in our culture. Why did my home state come to a standstill for a basketball tournament? Why does my wife’s home state shut down for a football game? Writing Fight Songs was one way of exploring those questions. Reading these books was another.
If you’re a North Carolinian of a certain age and background, reading To Hate Like This is like looking into one of those magnifying mirrors: You’ll see yourself, but with every pore and blemish blown up to comic proportions.
If you’re not a North Carolinian of that age and background, you’ll learn much about why we are the way we are. Though ostensibly about the fierce basketball rivalry between the University of North Carolina and Duke, it’s really about the pulls (and repulsions) of home, of family, of history, of language.
Even if you don’t like basketball, even if you hate both Carolina and Duke as much as I do, if you’ve ever felt deep ambivalence about your place of birth, you’ll love this book.
An obsessively personal history of the blood feud between North Carolina’s and Duke’s basketball teams and what that rivalry says about class and culture in the South
The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics, and perhaps in all of sports. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses athletics; it is rich against poor, locals against outsiders, even good against evil. In North Carolina, where both schools reside, it is a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of…
Born the half-breed, bastard son of an orc chieftain, Wrank tries to survive life in OrcHome among ignorance and spite aimed at his human heritage even as he develops a Talent for folding shadow. When life is no longer viable among the clans, he escapes into the world of humans…
I am an author who writes hot-as-sin small-town romance. As an avid romance reader, when I found my love of all small-town things combined with high heat of steamy romance, I was hooked! With steamy, small-town romance you get feel-good, heartfelt romances with steamy, open-door scenes. If it can make you blush and warm your heart, I’m all in! In my list, I’ve included a variety of small-town romance authors that will tug at your heartstrings in one scene and have you fanning yourself in the next.
In my eyes, Claire Kingsley can do no wrong. Her small-town romances are epic. They include all the fun details that I love about small towns – nosy neighbors, family drama, small-town quirks (like dueling families and a pack of squirrels that are up to no good) – all while delivering some of the hottest scenes you can read. This series does need to be read in order, but you will not regret it! Each of the Bailey Brothers are so swoony and I promise it will be nearly impossible to pick your favorite!
One night brings them together. Another night tears them apart.
Grace Miles misses her easy friendship with Asher, but growing up means growing apart. And really, how could he fall for her when they spent their childhood getting muddy in the creek and splitting sticks of gum? But this summer, something feels different. If Grace didn’t know better, she’d think Asher was flirting with her. Those dark eyes, hard body, and wicked smile make her insides swirl and her heart dare to hope for things she’s convinced herself she’ll never have.
Falling for your best friend shouldn’t be complicated, but…
I’m mostly known for my zombie/post-apocalypse novels and being a prepper. So why did I choose the revenge topic and what qualifies me as an expert? Zombies and apocalypse storytelling were never my first love. My first has always been reading stories of revenge both true-life and fictional. This helped inspire and drive me as a writer in my early days in this genre. The stories by the authors I have listed here not only influenced me in my writing style but also fueled me to write my own revenge story anthology. But mostly, I have a very twisted mind!
The two most influential writers of the 19th Century, who perfected the art of writing revenge stories were French-born Guy de Maupassant and American Edgar Allan Poe. Maupassant is the quintessential go-to Gothic storyteller for revenge and considered the greatest master of the short story in world literature. This collection has all his classic tales like “La Vendetta,” a tale about a grieving mother’s need for revenge, and my favorite, “The Hand,” about an avenging appendage. Plus, many more tales.
These early works by Guy de Maupassant were originally published in the 1880's. As a collection of short stories, this represents Maupassant's tales of revenge, and includes 'A Vendetta', 'Father Milon', 'Mother Sauvage', 'The Corsican Bandit', 'The Hand', and 'The Lancer's Wife'. Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France. He came from a prosperous family, but when Maupassant was eleven, his mother risked social disgrace by trying to secure a legal separation from her husband. After the split, Maupassant lived with his mother till he was thirteen, and inherited her love of…
Jill Leovy, author of Ghettoside, is a journalist and independent researcher who covered the Los Angeles Police Department and homicide for fifteen years, and who is currently working on a book dealing with murder and feud in human history. She has covered hundreds of street homicides and shadowed patrol cops, and she spent several years embedded in homicide detective units. More recently, she has been a Harvard sociology fellow and a featured speaker on Homer and violence at St. John's College, New Mexico. She is a senior fellow at the USC Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
Here’s a radical idea: let’s think deeply about murder. Let’s imagine that understanding why we fight and kill each other is as lofty an intellectual challenge as any other great, sweeping mystery of human nature or human origins.
Roger C. Gould never came out and said that a higher vision of murder was his purpose, but his book Collision of Wills achieves nothing less. It set a new bar for theorizing on human violence, and is a great, complex, and surprising tour de force about petty street violence.
If you're interested in lawlessness, Collision of Wills is indispensable, right up there with Donald Black's Behavior of Law. On a personal level, I'm grateful to this Harvard sociologist simply because he took the topic of petty street violence so seriously. Gould related rampant argument violence to the problem of unstable status in the criminal underworld.
Minor debts, derisive remarks, a fight over a parking space, butting in line-these are the little things that nevertheless account for much of the violence in human society. But why? Roger V. Gould considers this intriguing question in Collision of Wills. He argues that human conflict is more likely to occur in symmetrical relationships-among friends or social equals-than in hierarchical ones, wherein the difference of social rank between the two individuals is already established.
This, he maintains, is because violence most often occurs when someone wants to achieve superiority or dominance over someone else, even if there is no substantive…
In 2005, the Bookseller declared the Viking romance to be officially dead and never, ever coming back. However, they hadn’t consulted Harlequin Historical editors who researched the actual sales and desires of their readers. When my senior editor asked me if could I write one, I duly obliged with Taken by the Viking. The book beat lofty expectations, and the revival began such that the Viking period now ranks up there with Regency in terms of popular time periods for the line. The following list is some of the Viking set romances that I have escaped into on mainly rainy afternoons.
Willingham penned an absolute cracker of a revenge story for the first book in this five-book continuity about the Sons of Sigurd.
There is an overall mystery of who was responsible for murdering the warriors’ father. After losing his beloved, Alaar Sigurdson has vowed to take revenge and seeks to use captive Breanne O Callahan to get close enough to her foster father, but…the attraction overcomes them in this enemies-to-lovers tale.
It is an absolute page-turner which I inhaled in one sitting. There are reasons why the Sons of Sigurd is a global bestseller.
Part of Sons of Sigurd. Battle-scarred Viking Alarr is a broken warrior who expects to die carrying out his oath of blood vengeance. He saves maiden Breanne O Callahan from slavery only with the intention of getting close enough to kill her foster father. Until their spark of passion ignites a desire to keep her close...and presents Alarr with a gut-wrenching choice - his revenge or his heart?
