Here are 86 books that Promise of Blood fans have personally recommended if you like
Promise of Blood.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve been a sci-fi/fantasy fan ever since my dad introduced me to the original Star Trek (in reruns) and The Lord of the Rings in my youth. I’ve always loved thinking about possibilities—large and small—so my work tends to think big when I write. I also write poetry, which allows me to talk about more than just the everyday or at least to find the excitement within the mundane in life. These works talk about those same “possibilities”—for better or worse, and in reading, I walk in awareness of what could be.
Cormac McCarthy does the impossible in this book—he writes an emotionally satisfying, literary-minded travelogue of horrors. It shatters the reader but then lifts them up with its beautifully wrought prose.
Be patient: the novel gets brutally dark before the light.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if…
We’ve all read them: the girl who is unknowingly of royal blood but was sequestered to an ordinary family to protect her identity. The detective with the broken home and a drink problem is driven to solve the crime. The action hero who can shoot their way out of any encounter. While these tropes are the bread and butter of genre fiction, they get overused. I found that my favorite and most engaging characters were those with complicated lives whose pasts might catch up with them at an inconvenient moment. Here are some of my favorite stories with unconventional characters that shine through the narrative.
I came to this book by accident. I had overindulged in fantasy and was tired of recycled plots and worn tropes. I picked it up on holiday as a last resort and found a very different sort of fantasy, which rekindled my enthusiasm for the genre.
Inquisitor Glokta is a character I wanted to hate. He is a torturer, and a cripple, having been tortured himself. He’s ruthless and focused and possibly the meanest of anti-heroes. But I think I came to imagine what it was like to be the dashing hero, loved by everyone, feted by royalty, and then ruined by malice and torture, and yes, as this tale unfolded, I began to like him and the rest of the misfits that populate Joe Abercombie’s world very much indeed.
Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and increasingly bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer extraordinaire, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.
Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Vain, shallow, selfish and self-obsessed, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men.
I am a world traveler and educator, a student of psychology and myth, and a lover of the wild and ancient places. I believe that sword and sorcery, the vanguard of modern fantasy, is overdue for a comeback. These tales echo the trials of Hercules, the rage of Achilles, and the melancholy of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, to name a few. There is much yet to learn: I write to stir my readers’ blood, and to examine the lessons of the epics: that man must face down the inhuman and monstrous to discover himself; that we cannot truly live until we have borne a great trial of our own. Stay fierce!
For me, The Black Companyopened a whole range of personalities that could “work” for fantasy—the grim, desperate men of the Company are not good men… but they’re heroes nonetheless.I found The Black Company’sfocus on character over grandiose plot to be refreshing after many years of reading swollen tomes. Even better,The Black Companytaught me a lot about focusing in on the relationship between men: the Company men talk like the men I know, gruff, to the point, competitive and combative even when they’re working together. It feels rough and real in a way that sticks with me even years later. As a dad and an educator, my reading time is limited; Cook gets far more across, in far less space, than many other fantasy authors.
Some feel the Lady, newly risen from centuries in thrall, stands between humankind and evil. Some feel she is evil itself. The hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must, burying their doubts with their dead.
Until the prophesy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more. There must be a way for the Black Company to find her...
So begins one of the greatest fantasy epics of our age―Glen Cook's Chronicles of the Black Company.
I am a world traveler and educator, a student of psychology and myth, and a lover of the wild and ancient places. I believe that sword and sorcery, the vanguard of modern fantasy, is overdue for a comeback. These tales echo the trials of Hercules, the rage of Achilles, and the melancholy of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, to name a few. There is much yet to learn: I write to stir my readers’ blood, and to examine the lessons of the epics: that man must face down the inhuman and monstrous to discover himself; that we cannot truly live until we have borne a great trial of our own. Stay fierce!
A doomed king, the last of his kind: a final shepherd of a race fallen into such depravity and barbarity that most no longer see the Picts as human; a man driven to deliver his kin from Roman oppression, to lift his people out of squalor. I was floored by Howard’s iron-hard writing in this all-too-brief sequence of heroic stories. The razor descriptions cut to the core of a man willing to give his all in a doomed quest. I read and re-read the few tales of Bran, but I always find something new and ferocious in the brooding king’s tragedy and bitter triumph. These tales rekindled my love of sword and sorcery, and helped me hone the edge in my own stories. I recommend them to any fantasy fan!
From Robert E. Howard’s fertile imagination sprang some of fiction’s greatest heroes, including Conan the Cimmerian, King Kull, and Solomon Kane. But of all Howard’s characters, none embodied his creator’s brooding temperament more than Bran Mak Morn, the last king of a doomed race.
In ages past, the Picts ruled all of Europe. But the descendants of those proud conquerors have sunk into barbarism . . . all save one, Bran Mak Morn, whose bloodline remains unbroken. Threatened by the Celts and the Romans, the Pictish tribes rally under his banner to fight for their very survival, while Bran fights…
I’ve been writing fantasy for two decades now and still, I can’t resist a foul-mouthed rogue with a grubby soul. They’re usually the most entertaining characters to write and in the long days of plugging away at a book, they’re often the ones that remind you what’s so fun about the job. When I started Stranger of Tempest it was (pretty much solely) with that in mind – I wanted a disparate band of crazed, badass idiots to go on an adventure with and see where it took me. Of course, as I got to know them I found there was more to their tales than that, but it was fun right to the end!
The oldest book on the list and easily the most influential I’d suggest, the Black Company’s effect on fantasy goes way beyond books about mercenaries. The prose style isn’t for everyone (including me, I do find his style off-putting at times) but this is fantasy without dreamy illusions written by a man who knew first-hand what soldiers were really like. It’s grim and it’s dark, but he’s not playing for cheap or lurid shocks any more than he’s idealising anything.
I’ve loved all kinds of science fiction since I was a child, and always enjoy discovering new worlds, and the frisson of danger that inevitably accompanies the discovery. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and to write fiction and non-fiction. My two novels are An Accident of Birth, and the space opera, Galactic Alliance: Betrayal, and I’ve written a non-fiction reference book Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.
Ian Banks is as well known for his science fiction as for his mainstream and literary fiction. This is the first book in his Cultureseries, in which the Culture is a galaxy-wide advanced technological society with complex attitudes to how it should interact with other civilizations. The Culture is at war with the Idrians. Consider Phlebas is the story of a mercenary lone operative on a quest to retrieve a stranded Culture AI mind from an abandoned world to further the Idrian cause. The problem is that he is not the only one going there to find it, and nobody is playing nicely – not even the stranded AI mind. The wide-ranging inventiveness, subtle humour, and gritty realism of this story makes for highly compelling reading.
"Dazzlingly original." -- Daily Mail"Gripping, touching and funny." -- TLSThe war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza,…
I’ve always loved military history. Over time, the ancient Greeks won out. They have the coolest equipment! The more you find out about their culture, the more interesting they are. I studied Classics and English Lit. as an undergrad and went to Athens for my Master's. My PhD research was on ancient Greek warfare and historiography–how the Greeks wrote history. That became part of my first book, Military Leaders and Sacred Space in Classical Greek Warfare. I’ve taught in several universities, including courses on warfare, mythology, art, and historiography. I run the Panoply Vase Animation Project, which makes educational animations from ancient antiquities. I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw.
I love Xenophon's Anabasis, and it’s part of the reason I devoted my life to ancient Greece. Imagine a mercenary army who’ve gone to help in someone else’s war. They get trapped, their leaders are killed, and now they have to fight their way home. That’s Xenophon’s Anabasis, or Journey Up Country, written by a man who lived through it, essentially inventing a new genre of writing as he did so.
It’s a brutal read in some ways, as a lot of terrible things happen, but it’s also a story of survival and adventure. It’s a rip-roaring insight into what it was like to go on a campaign in antiquity and what it was like to be part of an ancient army in extraordinary circumstances.
Why hopepunk, and why me? Look, it’s no surprise that you can look around today and find all sorts of indicators that we are entering Heinlein’s “Crazy Years.” Imagining a dystopian or grimdark future isn’t difficult; all you have to do is read the news. But I think that we are writing the history of the future right now, by the choices we make every day. Writing stories that present that optimistic view of the future is not just the right thing to do but necessary, at least to me. As Heinlein said, “A pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun…”
I’m going old-school, back to one of the grandfathers of science fiction, Robert Heinlein.
Not only is his book a masterful example of character-driven storytelling, but it takes a critical eye to many of the things our current society takes for granted as being “true” and “right,” finding them wanting. It’s also been a huge influence on me in my writing, as have many of Heinlein’s other works, and I couldn’t not put it in here.
In 2075, the Moon is no longer a penal colony. But it is still a prison...
Life isn't easy for the political dissidents and convicts who live in the scattered colonies that make up lunar civilisation. Everything is regulated strictly, efficiently and cheaply by a central supercomputer, HOLMES IV.
When humble technician Mannie O'Kelly-Davis discovers that HOLMES IV has quietly achieved consciousness (and developed a sense of humour), the choice is clear: either report the problem to the authorities... or become friends.
And perhaps overthrow the government while they're at it.
As a child, I lived in a small valley sheltered from the night city lights. I could see the stars, and from that time, that is where my imagination dwelled. As a teenager, I read several of the books I have listed here, and from that point, I was inspired to read more and also to write myself. I sincerely believe that despite our current problems, humanity will outlive its troubled childhood and reach for the stars. We are destined for the stars, and only in the works of science fiction writers is that future explored. The books below helped me to become a successful author in my own right.
The main thing that impressed me about this book was the sheer originality of the story. Greg Bear has created a world unlike any I have read.
A giant asteroid appears above Earth and is hollow. Inside is a world beyond imagining, a world without end and a path to the future. I was inexorably drawn into the story from the very first page. I especially loved the way all of this is grounded in the very human characters and described in terms to which the reader can easily relate.
Bear is a master of descriptive writing, an author I cannot read enough of. Highly recommended.
From the New York Times–bestselling author of War Dogs: A novel that “may be the best constructed hard SF epic yet” (The Washington Post).
In a supernova flash, the asteroid arrived and entered Earth’s orbit. Three hundred kilometers in length, it is not solid rock but a series of hollowed-out chambers housing ancient, abandoned cities of human origin, a civilization named Thistledown. The people who lived there survived a nuclear holocaust that nearly rendered humanity extinct—more than a thousand years from now.
To prevent this future from coming to pass, theoretical mathematician Patricia Vasquez must explore Thistledown and decipher its…
As a veteran of the United States Army Special Operations Command, my time in the army will always guide my actions. When I began my career in cybersecurity and later took on the role of President and Chair of Conquest Cyber, I looked to my military experience for guidance. The lessons I learned from leaders were much like those I’ve learned through these books, and they are lessons that will benefit any leader, business owner, or founder.
Even corporate America needs heroes. While Tier One Wild is fiction, it was written by a true hero, Dalton Fury. Fury was the senior ranking officer in the Battle of Tora Bora. He helped author the operation to hunt and kill bin Laden.
This book, the second in the Raynor series, has the flair of someone who has been there as Fury has been. Its fast moving and includes elements of both redemption and sacrifice. While this would be easy to dismiss as fiction or another war story, readers will be surprised by how applicable the lessons can be in the business world.
New York Times bestselling author and former Delta Force commander Dalton Fury (Black Site and Kill Bin Laden) is back with an explosive new thriller
Former disgraced Delta Force commander Kolt "Racer" Raynor has earned his way back into The Unit after redeeming himself during an explosive operation at a black site in Pakistan. But he is about to face his deadliest challenge yet.
The most wanted man in the world, American al Qaeda commander Daoud al Amriki, and his handpicked team of terrorist operatives, have acquired stores of Russian-built, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (SAM's) from ex-Libyan spies in Cairo. Their…
