Here are 100 books that Mistborn fans have personally recommended if you like
Mistborn.
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I’ve known I was “special” since I was a child. I saw, felt, and heard things that others did not. Eventually I embraced my clairaudient mediumship gifts and turned it into a thriving business, allowing me to live a life of purpose: helping others find their passions and live their most joyful lives. But the journey never ends; I am always on a mission to transform. Consistently, literature has been where I turn when I am seeking wisdom on becoming the best version of myself. I also pursued certification as a Book Therapist - the first thing I’ll recommend to friends, family, or clients is the best book for their dilemma!
J.R.R. Tolkien's masterful storytelling is unmatched, and The Lord of the Rings weaves together moral dilemmas and profound philosophical ideas seamlessly, encouraging me to contemplate the nature of power, the importance of preserving the natural world, and the significance of individual choices.
The book's themes of heroism, friendship, sacrifice, and the struggle between good and evil resonate deeply. In addition, each of his characters feels like an aspect of oneself; the introspection it inspires is brilliant!
The Lord of the Rings instills a sense of wonder, ignites the imagination, and imparts timeless wisdom, which heavily transformed my perspective on life, my values, and my understanding of the human condition.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
I'm a fiction author and minister from Upstate New York. As a young boy, I had many supernatural experiences. My earliest memory is of a supernatural basis. For me, the unseen world, and those things that others either deny exist or have relegated to ancient history and myth, have always been real to me. Reading, films, video games, and all other forms of storytelling were ways for me to experience the strange and the mysterious. What I found as I walked through such places as Middle Earth, Narnia, and Ice Wind Dale, was that the stories of these characters that overcame adversity, failures, and weaknesses to become heroes inspired me as well.
So, if you haven’t already noticed, for most of this list I have chosen the first book in a series. Let's be honest, if you read fantasy, then you know pretty much every book is part of a series. In The Black Prism we are introduced to one of my favorite magic systems. In this system, the magicians or “Drafters” are able to turn light into substance. Each color of the light spectrum has a different property. A drafter can create constructs using light. Most people can only access one color, but there are those special people that can use multiple colors, and of course, there are the select few who can use all. What I love about this system is that it is only limited to the strength and imagination of the user.
I am a big fan of systems that you have to think to use. Anyone can…
In a world where magic is tightly controlled, the most powerful man in history must choose between his kingdom and his son - in the first book of the New York Times bestselling Lightbringer series, one of the most popular fantasy epics of the decade.
EVERY LIGHT CASTS A SHADOW.
Guile is the Prism, the most powerful man in the world. He is high priest and emperor, a man whose power, wit, and charm are all that preserves a tenuous peace. Yet Prisms never last, and Guile knows exactly how long he has left to live.
I love to cheer for underdogs, and young women who are in this category have my special devotion. As a child of the 1960s, I remember a time when women didn’t have the same rights and opportunities as men, and we still seem to be fighting it today. Coming from a trauma-based childhood myself, I find myself comparing and contrasting coping mechanisms. Luckily, I haven’t found it necessary to kill anyone with dragon stone or jacked-up hornets so far. It delights me when these girls win, whether they game the system or fight their way with guns and knives.
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.
HBO's hit series A GAME OF THRONES is based on George R R Martin's internationally bestselling series A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, the greatest fantasy epic of the modern age. A GAME OF THRONES is the first volume in the series.
'Completely immersive' Guardian
'When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground'
Summers span decades. Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun.
From the fertile south, where heat breeds conspiracy, to the vast and savage eastern lands, all the way to the frozen…
Vivian Amberville® is a popular dark fantasy book series about a girl whose thoughts can reshape reality.
First in the series, The Weaver of Odds introduces 13-year-old Vivian to her power to alter luck, odds, and circumstances. She is a traveler between realities, whose imagination can twist reality into impossible…
Whereas many seek out stories of human triumph and heroic deeds, I have always been captivated by stories that show humanity for what it is–a bastion of innovation and wonder but also a complex and ethically questionable force of nature. I began writing my book when I was twelve years old, and I immediately knew that my characters would not be one-sided, cast in light or shadow. Instead, they would love at times and hate others, try their hardest to do what is right, but sometimes end up doing more harm than good. Remember that a ‘hero’ is a product of perspective when reading these books.
Like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Frank Herbert’s book tells the story of a man who could be the villain or the hero, depending on who you ask. I love watching how an intelligent yet malleable person can be swept up in feelings of duty, responsibility, and leadership only to make highly questionable decisions.
Paul Atreides’ moral ambiguity is undeniably engineered by the shifting and slimy political landscape of the Dune universe, driving home the idea in my mind that good worldbuilding can set the stage for truly complicated characters.
Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
I’m a historian, and while I have a great deal of experience producing straight ‘nonfiction’ work, the idea of reading something ‘non-fictional;’ within a fictional world has always excited me because it allows many opportunities to talk about us while framing it as them. They also play into what I call the ‘Rutger Hauer Effect,’ where his character in Blade Runner mentions the wonderous things he’s seen in passing. I want to see those things too! Fictional nonfiction books provide a fantastic opportunity to tease the readers with things that their author knows and has seen but exist just beyond the reach of our own imaginations.
This is an absolute classic of the genre. Brooks draws in various ‘accounts’ of a recent zombie outbreak and structures them as if the broad details are common knowledge to his in-universe audience.
This approach means the real-world reader is always discovering new details and nuggets of information in a way that really whets the appetite while increasing the sense of horror at the way events unfolded in a world that isn’t quite our own.
It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginning of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse.
Faced with a future of mindless man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the ten-year fight against the horde, World War Z brings the finest traditions of journalism to bear on what is…
I love imperfect characters. They are more interesting, memorable, and three-dimensional than characters who have everything figured out. Imperfect characters are the most believable and readable because they are mirrors of ourselves. We live their stories more easily, and imperfect characters live the most awesome stories. Finding an imperfect female main character inhabiting a world full of conflict and then watching her strength emerge through a well-told story is one of my favorite reading experiences.
Of the five recommendations I made, this one is the heaviest. Historical fiction set in Germany during WWII, and having our main character be a poor German girl offers such an interesting juxtaposition of the starkness of the global stage with homelife for Liesel.
Another reason I love this book: Death as the narrator. So awesome giving Death a voice and imagining how he might think/feel. I also love how multifaceted all the characters are–they are full of both light and darkness, but it’s their decisions that determine if light will shine in such dark times.
'Life affirming, triumphant and tragic . . . masterfully told. . . but also a wonderful page-turner' Guardian 'Brilliant and hugely ambitious' New York Times 'Extraordinary' Telegraph ___
HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.
After escaping from a government holding facility where she, along with other scientists, was being forced to build a deadly weapon. She headed for the most remote place she could think of, the wild Xantifal Mountains.
In my high school creative writing class, my teacher once said that good writing was a bit like looking at a star. If you look directly at it, it gets a little fuzzy and hard to see. But if you look just off to the side, the star becomes vivid and clear. That, to me, is exactly the power of spooky stories for young readers. We all deal with monsters, to varying degrees, throughout our lives. Even kids. But if we look at it just off to the side, through the angle of a fun, spooky story, those monsters suddenly become much more comprehensible. More faceable. More beatable.
It’s been said by smarter people than me how writing horror for kids isn’t about scaring them, it’s about showing them how brave they are.
A Monster Calls is the perfect illustration of that. The scariness and the spookiness are a stand-in for the real-life horrors that this kid is facing. Kids deal with a lot, and this book is the perfect example of how to survive when the worst happens.
The artwork too—wow! I wish I could get some of this artwork to hang on my walls. Absolutely gorgeous book.
The bestselling novel and major film about love, loss and hope from the twice Carnegie Medal-winning Patrick Ness.
Conor has the same dream every night, ever since his mother first fell ill, ever since she started the treatments that don't quite seem to be working. But tonight is different. Tonight, when he wakes, there's a visitor at his window. It's ancient, elemental, a force of nature. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Patrick Ness takes the final idea of the late, award-winning writer Siobhan Dowd and weaves an extraordinary and heartbreaking…
I’m Scott Drakeford, engineer, former corporate person, long-time reader of fantasy fiction, and current author of epic fantasy books that heavily feature a fight against an unjust empire. I’m also the co-host of the Publishing Rodeo podcast, which explores the business side of traditional publishing. I approve this message.
Speaking of books, I love The Saxon Tales, or as you TV plebs will know it, The Last Kingdom, which is absurdly good. I love the TV show (on Netflix), but the books are next-level.
Uhtred, son of Uhtred, raised by Danes but Saxon by blood fights to regain his blood right and the home that was stolen from him. Cornwell writes the best battle scenes in all of literature, and these books are full of them. I loved them so much that I styled the fighting in my own books after Cornwell’s battle scenes in this series.
The first book in the epic and bestselling series that has gripped millions.
A hero will be forged from this broken land.
As seen on Netflix and BBC around the world.
In a land torn apart by conflict, an orphan boy has come of age. Raised by the Vikings, deadly enemies of his own Saxon people, Uhtred is a fierce and skilled warrior who kneels to no-one.
Alfred - Saxon, king, man of god - fights to hold the throne of the only land still resisting the pagan northerners.
Uhtred and Alfred's fates are tangled, soaked in blood and blackened…
I’ve loved animals for as long as I can remember. When I was young, girls my age were seeking out babies to admire. I was around the corner looking for puppies, frogs, or any other animal I could get my hands on. I’ve spent decades seeking out animals, and the more I learn about them, the more I realize how much they can teach us, point out what we otherwise might have missed, or offer a startlingly different (and often more helpful) perspective on things. The following books are some of my favorites that bring to light the unique and profound truths animals reveal to us.
Who hasn’t dreamt of being able to converse with a wolf? We get our chance in this intriguing story of Fitz Farseer, my all-time favorite character.
There’s much to enjoy in this series—royal assassins, secret mentors, and family betrayal—but what I love most is the outlawed magic that creates a deep bond between Fitz and a fearless wolf named Nighteyes, allowing them to communicate.
Nighteyes, another favorite character, reminds me of my childhood golden retriever, only with sharper fangs and claws. He reveals exactly how much we’re missing out on when we can’t converse with animals like him—sharing their sharper perceptions, grasping the wolfishly obvious, or having our human foolishness pointed out in their bluntly canine way.
Voyager Classics - timeless masterworks of science fiction and fantasy.
A beautiful clothbound edition of Assassin's Apprentice, the first book in the critically acclaimed Farseer Trilogy.
In a faraway land where members of the royal family are named for the virtues they embody, one young boy will become a walking enigma.
Born on the wrong side of the sheets, Fitz, son of Chivalry Farseer, is a royal bastard cast out into the world, friendless and lonely. Only his magical link with animals - the old art known as the Wit - gives him solace and companionship. But the Wit, if…
This is a multicultural epic fantasy with a diverse cast of characters. Sickly fifteen-year-old Prince Psal, the son of warrior-king Nahas, should have been named Crown Prince of all Wheel Clan lands. But his clan disdains the disabled.
When the mysterious self-moving towers that keep humans safe from the Creator's…
I’ve loved creating and writing stories since childhood, and my ambitions started early. I started one of my largest and longest writing endeavors back in middle school—novelizing a popular video game called Chrono Trigger—and even into adulthood, it stretched into a serious effort. I used it to hone my writing craft for years, constantly bouncing feedback off others. Eventually, people started to tell me that the best parts of that story were the scenes I added to enhance it, and I finally decided that I wanted to pursue the creation of my own fantasy series.
This is one of the finest works of modern epic fantasy available. Although the pace is not swift, Rothfuss styles the whole thing with beautiful, carefully crafted prose that makes this novel an enjoyable read. The main character, Kvothe, provides plenty of wit and grit. It’s worth reading despite being part of an infamously unfinished series.
I’ve tried to style some of my own prose and wit off of Rothfuss from time to time.
The lyrical fantasy masterpiece about stories, legends and how they change the world. The Name of the Wind is an absolute must-read for any fan of fantasy fiction.
'This is a magnificent book' Anne McCaffrey
'I was reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, and J. R. R. Tolkein, but never felt that Rothfuss was imitating anyone' THE TIMES
'I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University…
