91 books like Notes from the Burning Age

Adam is a limited edition robot who can pass for human (something I can’t do on a bad day). It takes a while for Adam to learn to be part of that world, but as time passes, he moves from being the slave of his owner Charlie to being better than him in every way (just ask his girlfriend!). I kept thinking of what would it be like to have a better version of me hanging around the house. It took slaves a long time to be recognized as people, how long for the robots?

Not her most famous speculative novel, but one which has a lot to say about where our societies might be headed. Automation and the soaring cost of living have wrecked the economy. The solution seems bizarre at first – people spend half their lives in prison – but as the novel progresses, it starts to seem normal, plausible even. Atwood is asking us how much we really value our freedom, and what conditions might prompt us to surrender it willingly. This has a dotted line to human relationships and love, exploring why people get together and stay together – or not. More than ever Atwood’s dark wit is on display here, though whether we should be laughing about these things is an open question!

Published in 2016, the provocative title of this novel seemed outlandish at the time, but regrettably, some of what it predicted has now come to pass. As you’d expect from a novel written by such a senior Army officer, this is a military novel delivered with technical accuracy and an eye on strategy, but also contains some interesting political elements – and how military chiefs interact with them. The politicians have often been renamed, but it’s not too hard to draw a dotted line to the real world. Owing to the author’s closeness to the events he describes, sometimes this doesn’t feel like a novel at all, more like a work of military history viewed from an unknown future, particularly when viewed through the lens of the horrors we’ve seen in Ukraine. 

I’m personally fascinated by bees (there are a few of them that turn up in my own book), so a speculative novel where they play a starring role was always going to be a must-read for me. Lunde’s novel spans 150 years and reminds us that for all our ingenuity and invention, humans are nowhere near as smart as the natural world, and we mess about with it at our peril. For bee aficionados, there’s a great deal of knowledge in these pages. There’s also thoughtful, reasoned speculation about what the 21st Century will mean for China’s place in the world, and a seamless interweaving of narratives. It’s an often sad novel that reminds us that we’re not as powerful as we think we are. 

Mistborn was my first experience with gazillion-selling epic fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.

Kel and Vin are the two main characters, and I bonded with them immediately. IMHO what sets Mistborn apart from any other fantasy I’ve read is the magic system. I don’t want to spoil it, but it has something to do with metallurgy.

The twist is in worldbuilding, creating a world in which magic exists almost as a natural property, seemingly adding new laws of nature that are absolutely unique to the fantasy genre. It was so cleverly written and believable. I loved it.

This fascinating book provides insight into the mind of a cultured, erudite Vietnamese man who grew up in French Indochina. Truong Nhu Tang, simultaneously a South Vietnamese government official and a clandestine Viet Cong urban organizer, has inspirational encounters with Ho Chi Minh in Paris and Viet Minh guerrillas in the jungle. Captured by South Vietnamese police in 1968, he was released to the North in a US-Viet Cong prisoner exchange. After the War, becoming disillusioned with political repression and economic mismanagement by the new communist government, he escapes from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and ends up living in exile in Paris.

This highly browsable picture book uses poems, quotes, and short bios to tell the stories of young change agents like spies Jacqueline and Eileen Nearne, student Ruby Bridges, and scientist Angela Zhang. Fourteen artists illustrated the book, providing readers with an exciting new image on each page. I love this book because it’s for younger children—and they are hungry to learn about history, too.

As a Latin American from a country of such diverse cultures as Mexico, I recommend this book by Rigoberta Menchú because it is the first 20th-century voice from an indigenous woman who has taken up arms in defense of her people. For me this connection also touches my family’s past, because I too, lost a brother to armed conflict, just like Rigoberta. A biography from an author that speaks so personally of this struggle stirs the pages in this book and makes this testimony overwhelmingly moving for any reader. But this deep connection with the reader also creates an international concern for justice. Menchú’s voice puts forward in book form a Maya tradition of community where the collective “we” is stressed in the testimony, as well as a history where experience is one, uniting the writer with the events that are being reported.  

A novel based on the real-life story of the three Mirabal sisters, known as las mariposas (the butterflies) who became national heroes for their resistance to the dictator Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. The murder of these three courageous women by Trujillo’s henchmen helped to catalyze his downfall after more than 30 years of iron-fisted rule. When my publisher sent her an advance copy of my book in 1999, Julia sent me a lovely hand-written note that began more than two decades of friendship. Readers particularly interested in the contemporary relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti will find her non-fiction book, A Wedding in Haiti, well worth a read.

I was immediately hooked by Dr. John Womack's Zapata when I read it in graduate school. His combined storytelling and scholarship abilities are precisely what made me fall in love with history. Furthermore, this book inspired me to write Pancho Villa to complement the narrative of the revolution. Because, while Pancho Villa is the revolutionary leader fighting for the rights of mixed-race working class of the Mexican north, Zapata is the revolutionary leader committed to restoring the dignity and the ancestral lands of the indigenous population of the Mexican south. Here, Womack masterfully weaves Zapata's life with the Mexican Revolution. An unquestionably classic, this book is a praised scholarly work that reads like a novel.