I'm going to a local fantasy book store this weekend and want to pick something up, so am looking for recommendations 😀 I really love books that blend fantasy and history, but specifically I like it when the history is as accurate as possible! Add dragons, but the societal structure should ideally reflect the time period if that makes sense. I like to feel like I'm truly in a different time and place, and like the author's done their research.
Books I've read and liked that are in this kind of vein: Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier; Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley; The Wandering Unicorn by Manica Mujica Lainez; The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S A Chakraborty; Deerskin by Robin McKinley; The Liveship Traders by Robin Hobb
I'm not a fan of YA so much, but I'm perfectly happy with horror or dark fiction. I also don't mind if it's a massive doorstop of a book, I love things I can sink my teeth into.
Any recs welcomed :3
by Either_Bend7510
11 Comments
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I will always and forever recommend the phenomenal **Between Two Fires** by Christopher Buehlman. A fantasy horror novel following a knight, a priest, and a mysterious girl on their journey through France at the height of the Black Death. It’s extensively researched, feels incredibly authentic, and is overall just a great book.
R.F. Kuang does a really good job rooting her fantasy novels in historical accuracy. *Babel* is set mostly in England during the early 19th century.
If you’re okay with reading grimdark fantasy, Kuang’s *The Poppy War* (all the trigger warnings) is heavily inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Rose code
The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik is the Napoleonic Wars with dragon cavalry
The 1632 series by Eric Flint is about a small American town sent through time and space to 17th century Germany.
* *The Red Magician* by Lisa Goldstein
* *The Golem and the Jinni* by Helene Wecker
* *Little, Big* by John Crowley
* *The Anubis Gates* by Tim Powers
* *Dragon America* by Mike Resnick
* *The Tales of Alvin Maker* series by Orson Scott Card
Also, many of the fantasy books by Guy Gavriel Kay are based on real history.
Are you familiar with magical realism? If not, I think you might like it, although I don’t know of any that have dragons. They’re realistic, often historical, but have elements of the fantastic, like telling the story about the horrors of slavery and its aftermath with a ghost story, like **Toni Morrison’s** ***Beloved***. Or India’s independence and history mingled with telepathy and other fantastic events, like **Salman Rushdie’s** ***Midnight’s Children***. Or more subtle elements like the history of the Dominican Republic with occasional supernatural elements as in **Junot Diaz’s** ***The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao***. And I can’t mention magical realism without **Gabriel Garcia Marquez**, all of his works.
You might enjoy A Natural History of Dragons: a Memoir by Lady Trent (by Marie Brennan) – as the title suggests, it’s written memoir-style by a Victorian-era lady dragonologist. I’ve only read the first book, but I’ve heard the rest of the series is just as good 🙂
Lent by Jo Walton
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
If you don’t mind substituting location (Louisiana bayou) for history, then there is Highfire by Eoin Colfer, which has a smuggler stumbling on a dragon there.