Here are 100 books that Truth and Other Lies fans have personally recommended if you like
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I loved books as a kid, especially fantasy books, but could never find anyone like me within their pages. I’m a lesbian Chinese writer who adores stories about messed-up, complicated queer people. I’m thrilled by the range of books available now that feature queer, messy characters. We all deserve representation, and to me that means representation that’s complex, that encompasses the ugly and the beautiful. One of my goals as an author is to make you fall in love with monsters—brutal, flawed women who may not deserve love, but who demand it all the same.
A Dowry of Blood is an homage to Dracula’s brides, written entirely in epistolary format by his first bride, Constanta. It starts in the middle ages and spans several centuries as Dracula (ever nameless in this book) collects two more brides besides Constanta, creating an MFFM polycule.
It’s a repudiation of abusive romantic relationships, and to that end it’s deeply satisfying. A Dowry of Bloodis a standalone gothic horror, with an all-bisexual cast of vampires.
S.T. Gibson's sensational novel is the darkly seductive tale of Dracula's first bride, Constanta.
This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. . .
Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things.
Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband's dark…
I’m a woman in a technology field dominated by men, a person with both mental and physical problems, and I’ve studied a dozen different martial arts. I’m a mean shot with a bow and love to hurl axes and spears. None of these things are contradictory. They’re just different aspects of me. Real people don’t fit in boxes and neither should good characters. My world is filled with my Hispanic grandkids, my bi daughter, my gay foster brother, my friends and family and people I love that don’t fit the Captain Awesome stereotype. Remember that we, too, can be heroes.
The heroine in Legend & Lattes is a big orc lady, nothing like little Bilbo, but she’s done with violence.
She wants to build a settled business selling drinks and pastries. The giant heroine and the succubus behind the counter get constantly misjudged because of their appearances. As a woman carving her path in the tech industry, I know how that feels.
This book also taught me, right along with the heroine, that solving problems without violence can be even more heroic. A good story doesn’t require fight scenes. The wins were all kinds of satisfying, from the successful business to the happy gay romance.
Cozy fantasy is a sub-genre I love now. Characters and their relationships are the point, not just the hands to wield the magic swords.
High fantasy, low stakes - with a double-shot of coffee.
After decades of adventuring, Viv the orc barbarian is finally hanging up her sword for good. Now she sets her sights on a new dream - for she plans to open the first coffee shop in the city of Thune. Even though no one there knows what coffee actually is.
If Viv wants to put the past behind her, she can't go it alone. And help might arrive from unexpected quarters. Yet old rivals and new stand in the way of success. And Thune's shady underbelly could make it all…
I’ve been reading books about dark content since I was a teenager, and I’ve always loved the understanding and companionship it provides to people who carry around broken pieces of themselves. Over the years, this interest in hardship has become a lot more specific; I’ve discovered my own queer identity, which has cause me to seek shelter in queer fantasy. It also inevitably lead me to queer Norse mythology, whose source material is dripping with queer hints for anyone with the historical knowledge to find them. Combining all these things, I’ve gathered a large collection of stories that promise to help you lick your wounds, all while drawing you into the next chapter.
This book is just fun, but it’s also a weird kind of fun. Short and to the point, it follows two monstrous men as they wreak deadly havoc on a dark little town. It leans heavily on the media’s history of queer-coding villains in stories and allows the characters to be unapologetically evil. Readers who enjoy this book will find themselves thinking the pair are strangely cute together, all the while trying to remember that they’re very dangerous. It’s great as an audiobook and makes the perfect palate cleaners between longer books.
“A black tide of perversity, violence, and lush writing. I loved it.” —Joe Hill
A Finalist for the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award!
Debut author Jennifer Giesbrecht paints a darkly compelling fantasy of revenge in The Monster of Elendhaven, a dark fantasy about murder, a monster, and the magician who loves both.
The city of Elendhaven sulks on the edge of the ocean. Wracked by plague, abandoned by the South, stripped of industry and left to die. But not everything dies so easily. A thing without a name stalks the city, a thing shaped like a man, with a dark heart…
I daylight as a lawyer, moonlight as a stand-up comic and gaslight as a storyteller. A connoisseur of mythology and momos, I have often wondered how our ancient tales might have unfolded if narrated from women’s perspectives - a curiosity kindled since I listened to my grandmother’s grievances even as she regaled me with these stories. In the same breadth, I could not help but see how harmful and reductionist “evil” labels can be especially when history is chronicled only by victors. It is this quest of humanizing the vanquished and the vilified while honouring the essence of a timeless epic that led me to play a medieval matchmaker by wedding Indian Lore to Italian Renaissance.
In a world saturated with Greek Mythological Retellings, The Witch’s Heart is a breath of fresh (cold) air from Valhalla.
Angrboda—a woman who made a recent appearance in the God of War PS4 games—blazes across this book as the mother of monsters! Odin's wrath leaves her powerless, and her only escape route? Off to a remote forest she dashes. Enter Loki, that sly trickster, stumbling upon her and—bam!—love sparks, birthing three whelps, each harbouring their own cryptic fate.
It's a Norse mythology remix with a modern twist and a brand-new leading lady—epic, heartbreaking, and full of oomph! And if every time you see Loki, you see Tom Hiddleston's mischievous grin, you aren’t alone.
Angrboda's story begins where most witch tales end: with being burnt. A punishment from Odin for sharing her visions of the future with the wrong people, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into the furthest reaches of a remote forest. There she is found by a man who reveals himself to be the trickster god Loki, and her initial distrust of him-and any of his kind-grows reluctantly into a deep and abiding love.
Their union produces the most important things in her long life: a trio of peculiar children, each with a secret destiny, whom she…
I grew up in Sweden surrounded by archaeology steeped in Viking history, which fueled my interest in Norse mythology. For example, Uppåkra, the largest and richest Iron Age settlement in Scandinavia, is only a few miles from my childhood home. When my seventh-grade history teacher noticed my fascination with the Viking myths, he started recommending me books. Ever since, I’ve read extensively about the Norse pantheon, and its stories inspire my own writing. I’ve also taken several research trips to historical Viking settlements in Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland.
This book I love purely for the photographs of archeological treasures and historical paintings. It’s in the format often referred to as a “coffee table book.” However, even though you may be tempted to page through it only to look at its impressive graphics and illustrations, the content is very much researched and informative. I especially like the sections on magical creatures and how Norse mythology has influenced our modern world and more current fiction.
You may not think you know much about Norse mythology but you've heard of Valhalla and the Valkyrie, and of trolls and elves, and you'd certainly miss Wednesday and Thursday - named after Norse gods - if they weren't there. Norse mythology is rich in adventure and ideas about creation, death and the afterlife. And from Wagnerian operas to Lord of the Rings to Marvel's Avengers, it has had an immense influence across Western culture. Norse Myths takes a wide-ranging approach to the topic, examining the creation stories of the Norse world, the monsters and the pantheons of the deities…
Mostly, I’m a writer of (hopefully) humorous books and articles largely focused on Vikings and Norse mythology, but I also write non-fiction articles about Scandinavian history, art, and culture. I’ve always been fascinated with the Viking Age, and read as much fiction and non-fiction on the subject as I am able. I’ve discovered many great novels dealing with the “whole Northern thing” (W.H. Auden’s term for Tolkien’s fascination) ranging from realistic historic fiction to highly original urban fantasy that utilizes the standard Norse tropes, but truly imaginative retellings that remain faithfully grounded in the plot points of the ancient stories are rarer. These are my favorites.
Klas Östergren is one of Sweden’s foremost literary novelists and The Hurricane Party was his contribution to Canongate’s early 21st-century Myth Series (although it was apparently subsequently removed from it). The Hurricane Party is the most imaginative retelling of Norse mythology that I’ve read. It focuses on events that precede Ragnarök and takes place in a futuristic, climate-ravaged, dystopian Stockholm. The plot centers around the Flyting of Loki, a pivotal scene from The Poetic Edda in which Loki turns against the gods and kills one of their servants. Östergren’s novel follows the journey of the father (his own invented character) of this servant as he searches for answers to his son’s death against this unique backdrop. The setting and premise are among the most original I’ve ever encountered.
Hanck Orn's son is dead. When they come to the door they tell him it was a heart attack, but he knows they are lying.
So he travels to the outermost reaches of the land to find out what really happened. When he lands on the island he is met by a young woman, hair streaked with blood, raving like a lunatic. She is one of the sisters, who tell him the story of how his son died in the great hall of the Clan, the Norse gods, who were holding a party. But the festivities soon got out of…
J.D. Foslan is the author of Loki’s Saga: A Novel of the Norse Gods and has been a practicing Polytheist and mystic for over a decade. The author’s other interests include the Frisian language spoken by roughly a half-million people in the Netherlands.
This richly detailed book explores the worship of Odin and his wife, providing information from Continental sources as well as surviving Norse lore. It paints a different and more complete picture of a major goddess, and also brings to light older sides of Odin that have nothing to do with our modern images of Viking berserkers.
For more than a millennium, the people of Northern Europe venerated an Earth goddess, which evidence attests is the oldest known Germanic deity. Called by a number of names, when the accounts are compared, common traits emerge. During Yule, she rides among her people in a wagon inspecting homes, rewarding the industrious and punishing the lazy. With her husband, she leads the fearsome Wild Hunt, riding through the winter skies, cleansing the air of evil. Most often identified as Odin's wife, the ancients called her "Mother Earth", "Queen of Heaven", and the "Mother…
I love history as did my mother and her family. I am English by birth and, so, it is English history I am most interested in. To know who you are and where you are from is, to me, very important. At school history was the subject I excelled at. In my mature years I worked as a Business Unit Manager at a University and took history papers for amusement, but I never continued with a degree as BA papers were too basic and an MA and PhD too expensive. I did, however, write academic peer-reviewed papers that were published.
Just who was the Germanic God who carried many variations of the name, Wodin, Odin, Oðin, Votan, Wodan, Photan? What is the actual story behind the Germanic/Norse mythology he features in? This novel is an extremely amusing explanation that in fact he was a rather dodgy trader who, partly because of his earlier occupation as a doctor, ends up as a god in all of Germania, as do his also dodgy mates and promiscuous wife.
A previous knowledge of the mythology helps, but is not essential. I found it very funny and it was one of the inspirations for my own tales.
In the second century AD, a Greek nobleman is travelling and living abroad in Germany while carrying on an affair with a military man's wife. When discovered, he takes an emergency business trip to save his life and packs amongst his belongings certain items that lead the people he encounters to think him a Norse God, a fortuitous point of view which he does little to dispel. Forced to keep up the pretence of being a god while staying one step ahead of his lover's jealous husband, Photinus must juggle the severity of his situation with the enjoyment of being…
I got started as a writer through writing fiction intended to accompany a hobby, to deepen worldbuilding, and breathe life into the miniatures in a table-top wargame. I have always been fascinated by the worlds that grab our attention, that yank at our nostrils and dare us to make something more, to tell our own stories in this grander universe. So, I put together this list of books to accompany you as you dream of other worlds and build something with that hobby, whether it is painting miniatures for your friends, knitting, or whatever keeps your hands occupied. Here is a list of books to keep you company.
Jackson Crawford’s lectures on Norse mythology make a wonderful accompaniment to any bit of hobby-doing. It fits, I think, with the venue these stories would have originally been told, something to pass the time, to make work of the hand and eye go by a bit faster. What better to help inspire some fantasy making, like painting miniatures or knitting something more elaborate than stories of gods and heroes of a bygone age, when magic was real, and the gods and giants battled around us? I started with Dr. Crawford’s YouTube lectures on all things Old Norse and came to appreciate his engaging style and masterful depth of the subject. He brings the stories to life and reveals the language as it may have been spoken. He puts the myths in their contexts. I view any day that I haven’t learned something new as a bit of a waste and…
Thor, Odin, Loki, Freyja, the Valkyries, Valhalla, Ragnarok — many of the places we encounter these and other names, places, and events from Norse mythology in daily life and pop culture are connected to the medieval sources in name only.
Join Jackson Crawford, a translator of Old Norse, for a rousing introduction to the original stories, characters, and themes of Norse mythology in these 24 lectures. Packed with gods, anti-gods, magical figures, human heroes, religious practices, and literary devices, this course lays bare the reasons for our enduring fascination with these undeniably dramatic tales. It also connects the dots to…
I’ve been immersed in Norse Myth for more than a decade and writing books about the Gods I’ve always wanted to read. My Fate of the Gods trilogy is a mythic mash-up of Biblical, Norse, Greek, and Egyptian myth, and writing as Amalia Carosella, my book Daughter of a Thousand Yearsis Viking age historical fiction about Freydis, the daughter of Erik the Red. Additionally, as a Norse Pagan polytheist myself, finding books that do justice to the Gods in our modern world is that much more important to me than your average reader - I’m always looking to celebrate the books that bring them to life!
Another take on Ragnarok, but wholly different from Norse Code. Set in a post-apocalyptic mini Ice Age—the fimbulwinter that precedes Ragnarok—and following a soldier/mercenary who signs himself up with no real idea of what he’s in for, Age of Odin gives us an action-packed war-driven adventure with fun takes on familiar and less familiar gods along the way—even including Ratatosk, the squirrel who resides upon and spreads gossip all along the World Tree.
Gideon Coxall was a good soldier but bad at everything else, until a roadside explosive device leaves him with one deaf ear and a British Army half-pension. So when he hears about the Valhalla Project, it's like a dream come true. They're recruiting former service personnel for excellent pay, no questions asked, to take part in unspecified combat operations.
The last thing Gid expects is to find himself fighting alongside ancient Viking gods. The world is in the grip of one of the worst winters it has ever known, and Ragnaroek - the fabled final conflict of the Sagas -…
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