62 books like The Warlord Chronicles

The challenge of writing historical fiction set in the distant past is bridging the vast gap between our modern understanding of the world and that of our distant forebears, since even our most basic assumptions and values undergo enormous changes over time. Those who love Renault’s works about classical antiquity relish the ability of her novels to truly carry us into another world, to make it felt and intelligible. This novel follows the fortunes of the mythic hero Theseus, from his origins in Troizen to his departure for Athens to find his father, his achievement of the kingship of Eleusis, his voluntary enslavement in Crete as a bull-dancer, an acrobat who vaults over living animals for spectacle, his confrontation with the minotaur and his eventual return home, older and more baffled by existence. It gives dimension to the mythic hero, a complexity that is at once familiar and profoundly, unsettlingly… show more.

While The Swerve is not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Things by Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity. 

A murder mystery narrated by the victim, just as much in the dark about who killed him as we are. That alone would be enough to draw me in, but this novel has so much more – above all, a subtle insistence that we get to grips with a completely new way of seeing. The victim and each of his potential murderers are artists, their actions constrained or compelled by the rules which governed representation in 1590s Istanbul – ingrained in them since childhood. They cannot represent shadows, because God needs no light to see us by, nor perspective because He sees us all equally. 

Will anyone succeed in overcoming their conditioning for long enough to bring the killer to justice – and free his victim’s restless soul?

Another perfectly realised novel, in which the ancient traditions of an isolated English village are lovingly resurrected and described – before being savagely undermined by enclosure. Harvest has both a murder and plenty of mystery but it’s really about desperation in the face of unstoppable, inhuman change. Crace writes prose as if it's poetry, most movingly about the villagers’ bewilderment and fury in the face of incomprehensible threats – and the sheer speed at which an entire way of life can disappear. It’s enough to make you wonder what, if anything, will remain of our most cherished traditions.

I was about seventeen, at an airport waiting for a flight to Cyprus when I picked up this book whilst browsing. Didn’t realise at the time it would change my life forever. I read it three times in two weeks, despite finding out after the first time it was the third in a trilogy. I was hooked on the blood and the battles, the brotherhood of Arthur’s soldiers, the bygone era Bernard Cornwell seemed to so effortlessly breathe back to life. I haven’t looked back since.

The Guinevere Deception is a brilliant Camelot retelling that drew me in for many reasons, the main one being the friendships between the women in White’s book. Guinevere has strong connections to the women close to her and this helps her take on her new rule as Camelot’s queen. I also loved how White made the famous knight Lancelot a woman, which further plays with the King Arthur legend. As if that wasn’t enough to recommend this book, White kept readers guessing with the romance in this book. Who will Guinevere choose? Morded? Arthur? Someone else? You have to keep reading the trilogy to find out!

Jack Whyte's Uther blew me away. Instead of the semi-mystical style I expected, given the magical associations with the Arthur legends, it wove a gritty, down-to-earth tale of Roman-influenced Britain in a time of raiders, intrigue, and warring factions. The characters came to life in my imagination as I read, and their hopes and experiences, conflicts, and loves became my own.

I loved this book! Telling the story of a storyteller's life before eventually revealing his true identity, this novel is based during the end of Roman occupation in England and tells a new version of how Merlin came to be. Since the dark ages have always been of interest to me, thanks to numerous visits to living museums depicting the era and growing up with the mysteries of the era thanks to so much being lost in record from that era, exploring the what could have or just exploring the era through a book is just fascinating for me.

Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy (and the companion novel, The Wicked Day) creates an immersive world and is so enjoyable to read. The characters are alive and the words flow across the page like gentle pixie dust lulling you into a world of enchantment. There is no magical system per se but the magic is present in glimpses like sunlight off the surface of a broken mirror, only allowing us to perceive hints of its reflections. Even for those well-versed in Arthurian legends, the unique perspective of Merlin takes us on a new adventure. I loved the elements of philosophy in the story as well, both moral philosophy and metaphysics that relates to our understanding of the world and the natural and magical forces that shape it. 

Green’s book is a great read, very scholarly, and inclusive of a great deal of comparatively early source material on Arthur. If you want a good discussion of how you could go from a figure of Celtic myth to one of history, again and again in multiple stories, this is the best guide to that journey and deserves a hearing, whether ultimately you agree with it or not. You’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I am not persuaded, despite my considerable respect for the arguments made herein, largely for the same reasons as I noted in looking at Padel’s work above. It is extraordinarily difficult to determine whether Arthur passed from ‘history’ to folk-lore or folk-lore to ‘history’, better in my view to not distinguish these as two separate genres with this much clarity.

As usual, it all comes down to the Historia Brittonum, which is called… show more.