Here are 100 books that King Kelson's Bride fans have personally recommended if you like
King Kelson's Bride.
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I love British history. I am fascinated by ancient roots; legends and myths arising from around the Roman invasion. Stories of Boudicca, Casswallen, Celtic legends, and Arthurian tales hold me in a world of imaginings and anticipation. These exciting stories have been told and retold, but Cartimandua, Warrior Queen of Brigantia is new to me. She, a Yorkshire lass like me – led the largest tribe in Britain. I have become absorbed into the iron-age lives and loves of her Brigantia. The interwoven links between known facts and fantasy intrigue me. My favourite books here encouraged my journey of discovery; the old birthing the new. The legends from Britain grow.
I devoured this book with gusto. I guess we all seek a bit of magic sometimes.
When I read this book some thirty years ago, I had hit a rough patch. I wanted to escape the harsh reality surrounding me. The pages of this Celtic story transported me to a better place. You know the feeling, when fear drives you through heavy fog into the unknown? Once through, the landscape opens to excitement and promise.
Steven Lawhead used wonderful imagery to transport me to a time when warriors and kings held the future; when myths were the reality, and ordinary people became heroes. I want to live in a place where bravery and magic link hands. This is where ‘Song Of Albion’ led me. It’s my past and my future.
Wolves in Oxford; extinct beasts in Scotland: the barriers between our world and the Celtic Otherworld are breaking down. Two men are drawn into Albion, and changed for ever.
Tolkien and Lewis got their hooks into me when I was a teen and this led me to spend many hours playing RPGs, devouring fantasy novels by the armful. Unfortunately, many books were disdainful of faith (particularly of the medieval European variety) but the respectful ones inspired me. Years later, I decided to write my own novels and add a science-based perspective from 20+ years as an engineer. The result is a series of 5 epic fantasy novels. I have plans for more, branching out into sci-fi, romance, children’s books, and historical fiction. My recommendations showcase a few of the writers who inspired me and still provide a model for my work.
The second book of the original Shannara series follows a young man tasked with escorting a young woman to her destiny to forestall a demonic invasion. But a menacing evil stalks them: a seemingly invincible demon assassin. Can he unlock the magic secrets of the mystical Elfstones before he and his companions are destroyed and the world with them? Like many of Brooks’ novels, this one features superb world-building, white-knuckled tension, jaw-dropping action, and a bittersweet romance in a single package. The magic and environment of the book captured me in seconds and I wished Shannara was real. I re-read it from time to time and it is one of my all-time favorites.
Ancient, ultimate evil threatened the Elves and the Races of Man. For the Ellcrys, the tree of long-lost Elven magic, was dying, loosing the spell of Forbidding that locked the hordes of Demons away from Earth. Already the fearsome Reaper was free. Only one source had the power to stop it: the Elfstones of Shannara. And the valiant companions must ride again in an impossible quest to find them.
Tolkien and Lewis got their hooks into me when I was a teen and this led me to spend many hours playing RPGs, devouring fantasy novels by the armful. Unfortunately, many books were disdainful of faith (particularly of the medieval European variety) but the respectful ones inspired me. Years later, I decided to write my own novels and add a science-based perspective from 20+ years as an engineer. The result is a series of 5 epic fantasy novels. I have plans for more, branching out into sci-fi, romance, children’s books, and historical fiction. My recommendations showcase a few of the writers who inspired me and still provide a model for my work.
A rousing tale of a scarred count sent to revitalize a dilapidated province in an alternate-world version of medieval France, this gem by Brittain and Bouchard features the interaction of religion and magic, engaging characters, a budding romance, and a whodunit worthy of a mystery novel. I especially liked the friendship between the Count and a magically-talented monk and how the authors handled the relationship between the Church and wizardry (a trait of Brittain’s other works from the Yurt series). Since it’s the first in a series, there is a follow-on and hopefully, more to come.
Magic, heresy, and treachery: Count Galoran must face them all to keep his high castle. - Galoran is a scarred warrior and younger son, cast aside by the emperor when his days of service seem over. - Melchior is a priest trained in the difficult and highly dangerous magical arts, with dark family secrets to hide. The two are thrown together when Galoran unexpectedly inherits the castle and county of Peyrefixade, and Melchior is assigned as his spiritual advisor. Galoran soon learns that others covet his castle, the heretics who were supposed to have been defeated in the great war…
Tolkien and Lewis got their hooks into me when I was a teen and this led me to spend many hours playing RPGs, devouring fantasy novels by the armful. Unfortunately, many books were disdainful of faith (particularly of the medieval European variety) but the respectful ones inspired me. Years later, I decided to write my own novels and add a science-based perspective from 20+ years as an engineer. The result is a series of 5 epic fantasy novels. I have plans for more, branching out into sci-fi, romance, children’s books, and historical fiction. My recommendations showcase a few of the writers who inspired me and still provide a model for my work.
A young college student with confidence issues and a knack for verse is transported to a fantasy world where he finds a beautiful queen under siege by a multitude of malevolent actors, a set of unusual companions, and an environment wherein poetry is literally magical. Stasheff’s treatment of faith and magic is thoughtful, his characters interesting and the plot engrossing. I particularly like rooting for the protagonist as he grows, learns, and overcomes. The magic system based on poetry is pure gold and the series has stood the test of time: it’s still as fun of a read now as it was when it first came out.
The first of a light fantasy series, by the author of the "Warlock" series. Matt Mantrell finds himself suddenly transported to a world where magic is worked by the reciting of rhymes. Thrown into jail for practising sorcery, he conjures up a drunken dragon and falls in with a beautiful princess.
I started writing romance stories when I was about 15 and it was terrible fan fiction with me as the main character interacting with the “romantic hero,” but after a while, I got tired of that, and then I discovered my author mentor, Anne McCaffery and I began to think about creating actual fantasy characters and having them interact with one another in different worlds. The Stone Harp also let me have somewhat of an extra role in the books. My background in art and graphic design also let me use those skills in designing covers and marketing materials as well as illustrations in The Stone Harp and in other projects currently in the works.
This book is filled with a blend of magic, mages, and medieval mysticism! A complete fan of all things medieval, I found this book at the beginning of my jump into world-building. Kurtz’s character development is stellar and taught me to try even harder to develop characters a reader could love or hate. Throughout the entire “Dernyni” series you find many characters that you grow to care deeply about and some you cheer when they meet their demise!
Magic and mysticism come alive in this magnificent historical fantasy from the New York Times–bestselling author of the Chronicles of the Deryni.
Long before Camber was revered as a saint, he was a Deryni noble, one of the most respected of the magical race whose arcane skills set them apart from ordinary humans in the medieval kingdom of Gwynedd.
For nearly a century, Camber’s family has had little choice but to loyally serve the ruling Festils, Deryni usurpers who employed dark magic to wrest the throne from the rightful Haldane liege.
I’ve been a lover of fantasy stories, mythology, and folklore for a long time, mostly because fully realized fictional settings beyond our world enthralled me. My first forays into writing dwelt on fantasy with a strong historical slant, even when I dabbled in romance. It was also then that I realized my male characters had more chemistry with each other than with the females I’d paired them with. This is how I wound up in fan fiction, where virtually anything goes. During those years, I honed my writing, deepened my fascination with world-building, and crafted stories that would feed the wellspring of my first historical fantasy novel.
It was this book that disabused me of the notion that fantasy had to be written in a specific way, often in highfalutin or profound language. It encouraged me to put my own stories into writing.
Though very much a historical fantasy novel, this book was easy to understand despite the unfamiliar terms and background details of a fantastical universe. I think it’s due to Katheryn Kurtz’s initial use of simple, down-to-earth language and a fairly straightforward story, which, looking back now, was probably aimed at teenagers or young adults. I was sometimes reminded of the first volume of JRR Tolkien’s epic novel, especially because the succeeding books got progressively darker and more complex.
In this introductory book, the world of the Deryni, a race of mortals with magical powers, is fleshed out so well that the kingdom of Gwynedd, its people, and its neighboring realms feel so real that…
In the kingdom of Gwynedd, the mysterious forces of magic and the superior power of the Church combine to challenge the rule of young Kelson. Now the fate of the Deryni -- a quasi-mortal race of sorcerers -- and, indeed, the fate of all the Eleven Kingdoms, rests on Kelson's ability to quash the rebellion by any means necessary . . . including the proscribed use of magic!
I always wanted to be an archaeologist and literally dig up the past, touching objects telling me about people I could never know. Why did Shetland Celts make spherical stone balls? Whose hand held that bone needle? Was that a natural or a sacrificial death? In a different way, using the great gifts of words and imagination, reading historical fiction satisfies the same desire. Yes, that was what it felt like to work for William I, known in his time as William the Bastard; yes, that was how it felt to fear for your partner’s life every time he went to sea or into battle. Please, let these books open your eyes, your mind, too.
Edward Marston is a really prolific writer – he’s written seven or eight series of historical novels.
My personal favourite is the Domesday series, which follows the adventures of a group of men ordered to put right any mistakes in the Domesday Book, which William the Conqueror used to tax his English subjects. En route, Ralph Delchard and his colleagues also find time to solve a brand new crime – proto-private detectives, I suppose. The book roisters along with some strong female characters to lighten the masculine darkness.
The main reason I chose this is because when I read it I contacted the author to say how impressed I was. And then – Reader, I married him!
Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester, is enraged when his hawk is killed by an arrow in the Forest of Delamere. When two poachers are caught, he orders their execution yet neither of them fired the arrow. As Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret come to Cheshire to settle a series of disputes between Church and State, they are guests of the Earl. But when they explore the castle and discover that the Prince of Gwynedd is being held there as a hostage, a number of questions arise. Who is trying to rescue him? Why is Idwal, the over-zealous Welsh priest, lurking…
As an undergraduate at the University of Leeds in the 1960s the principal influence on my life and thinking was Trevor Ling an Anglican Priest and Buddhist who eventually became a Professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester. He was the start of my research on Islam and Asia and my peripatetic career having lived in Scotland, Germany, Holland, America, Australia and Singapore. I became a professor of the sociology of religion in the Asia Research Center at the National University of Singapore. I have published two books on Singapore, a handbook of religions in Asia, and several works on the body, medicine, ageing and human vulnerability.
I am including Turkey as located in Asia Minor. As a frequent visitor to Istanbul in the past, I watched with fascination the whirling Dervishes. I know it is corrupted by tourism. The dance reflects the legacy of Rumi the 13 century Persian poet. The beauty of Rumi’s philosophy and the world of Sufism comes through as does the grace of the body.
This brings together, in English, for the first time a number of articles in one volume that have been published in various books and journals and are reprinted with permission. Through this work, Rumi and his poetry as well as the whirling dervishes, will hopefully become more widely known in Western countries than they are at present. The whirling dervishes are famous for their ecstatic dance and but here it is hoped that their role within Sufism will become more clearly understood. The book is an attempt to suggest a renewed manner of thinking about one of the most celebrated…
Patrick Geary is Professor of History Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA. He is the author of some fifteen books and many articles and edited volumes on a broad range of topics including barbarian migrations, religious history, ethnicity, nationalism, genetic history, and the modern misuse of ancient and medieval history in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Currently he co-directs an international, interdisciplinary project funded by an ERC Synergy Grant that uses genomic, historical, and archaeological data to understand population structures during the so-called Migration period at the end of the Roman Empire in the West.
Rather than following a chronological order or a political narrative, Wickham, the leading British historian of the Early Middle Ages, takes a thematic and regional approach to the transformation of the Roman world across the Mediterranean.
His dense comparisons of the economic and social structures of specific regions, both some like Denmark and Ireland that were never part of the Roman Empire, as well as core regions around the entire Mediterranean, highlight the diversity already existing within the Roman Empire and the differing fates of these regions as they emerged from its disappearance.
The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s. In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country. In Framing the Early Middle Ages Chris Wickham combines…
I am a Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham and have been teaching, researching, and writing about all aspects of the Viking Age and its aftermath for many years. My particular expertise is in the poetry, sagas, and runic writings of medieval Scandinavia. To understand these, it has been important to me to follow in the footsteps of the Vikings from the Baltic to North America, to see the places they were familiar with, and to experience the traces of their culture in those places. These books tell the stories which will guide the armchair traveller on the same voyages.
According to this medieval tale, the Baltic island of Gotland was once so enchanted that it sank into the sea during the day and rose up again at night. From these mythical origins, this short saga, written in the special dialect of the island, tells how Gotland became populated, how some of them went east to Russia and Byzantium, how they exchanged their heathen idols for the Christian religion, and their relationship with the King of Sweden. It’s a rare literary insight into the Vikings’ eastern settlements and adventures.
