Fans pick 28 books like Lion's Blood

It’s a fascinating book. The story takes place in 2024, and some themes seem prophetic: water shortages, soaring food prices, the resulting social chaos, and Mars exploration. There is also a president who promises to “make America great again” (the book was written in 1993). 

I liked the story, though it left a rather heavy impression on me. I couldn't put it down despite how grim it was. I was especially fascinated by its invented religion, though I’m more inclined to view it as a philosophy. It was refreshing, stimulating, and thought-provoking.

Through her dystopian vision, Octavia Butler explores the issues of inequality, poverty, slavery, politics, capitalism, religion, and human psychology. Her book is a great analysis of what human beings are capable of in crisis.

Complex worldbuilding and the alternate history genre often go hand in hand, and they’re the part I enjoy most when reading reimaginings of our world. This book intertwines history with spirituality and shows how a small set of characters can enact a large change to the universe, which is something that is shown to be both optimistic (if the characters are good) and pessimistic (if the characters are evil/selfish).

It echoes so much of what I believe—that karma is a real force and depends on how it’s released into the world—so I found it refreshing to see these themes echoed in the storyline. History can change life for the better—or the worse—because of what we believe in.

Technically, this is an alternate-world book rather than alternate history. Still, I may be forgiven for including it in this list because it so closely parallels the events of the French Revolution. So, it almost seems like it could have actually happened… if magic existed in the world.

I love the main character’s journey. She starts out as a somewhat unlikeable and privileged woman and is brought low in life, only to emerge as a better and stronger person afterward. I think it’s a journey perhaps many of us take—we have the security of our childhood crushed by the expectations of becoming an adult and then have to learn how to be our true selves again in order to survive. I love a good coming-of-age story.

I must mention this book because it was one of the first alternate histories I read as a teen, and I remember how it caused me to dream about “what ifs.”

Although traveling back to 6th-century Rome didn’t sound like a lot of fun, I loved reading about the main character's ingenuity and how he uses his modern know-how to survive in the literal dog-eat-dog world of the past. It was a good roadmap in imagination about tackling a sudden change in fortune, and the writing was personable and fun to read.

Creative and deeply layered, this book has so much on offer: multiple universes, a boy who can talk to fish, a city built of rafts, sea monsters, and wonderfully clever and well-drawn characters. An absolutely beautiful and emotionally engaging story of escaped slaves and refugees fleeing for their lives seeking a new home and freedom. I was totally swept away.

The question of how to portray a historical atrocity like slavery in a work of fiction is obviously monumental. Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Colson Whitehead, and John Keene have approached this with consummate brilliance by writing the experience and subjectivity of enslaved and formerly-enslaved people. Johnson, however, focuses on the perpetrators: the men who engage in and profit from the capture and trafficking of other human beings. As in Mantel’s novel, the choice of the protagonist is key. Rutherford Calhoun is a ne’er-do-well free Black man from New Orleans who runs away on a ship to escape debts and engagement to a woman whose love he hasn’t done much to deserve. It turns out this ship is bound for Africa to collect a cargo of people, members of the Allmuseri tribe, an ethnicity Johnson invented for his fiction. But along with the people, they are also collecting something much more… show more.

In 2007, I was writing a biography of Liverpool merchant William Davenport, who had made his fortune via the slave trade.

As I researched Davenport’s dry ledgers and letterbooks, I was fortunate to have Marcus Rediker’s exceptional The Slave Ship to hand. Pushing back against the “violence of abstraction” inherent to the accounts of slavers like Davenport, Rediker’s book exposed the horrors of the Middle Passage in unflinching detail.

His book is also filled with powerful individual stories of captives, captains, and crewmen that demonstrated to me the importance of writing “human histories” of the slave trade.

This is another one that comes down to voice for me: hearing the story of one of the last African slaves to experience the Middle Passage in his own words. It’s moving, thought-provoking, and refocuses the vast and familiar history of the American slave experience to a disarmingly—and powerfully—human scale.

Despite the vast literature on the transatlantic slave trade, the role of sailors aboard slave ships has remained unexplored. This book fills that gap by examining every aspect of their working lives, from their reasons for signing on a slaving vessel to their experiences in the Caribbean and the American South after their human cargoes had been sold. It explores how they interacted with men and women of African origin at their ports of call, from the Africans they traded with, to the slaves and ex-slaves they mingled within the port cities of the Americas. Most importantly, it questions their interactions with the captive Africans they were transporting during the dread middle passage, arguing that their work encompassed the commoditisation of these people ready for sale.

I love this book for many reasons. The Sealwoman is a passenger on the slave ship that takes our protagonist form her beloved homeland, and the ‘gift’ of the title is the story she tells of her shapeshifting roots. The voyage is hellish, and contains a terrifying birth scene among other unspeakable, unimaginable, only just survivable events. It’s based on a true story, which makes it all the more powerful, and it makes me wonder about the hidden truths in the folklore contained within it, especially the sealwoman’s story.