Here are 9 books that Black Dragon fans have personally recommended once you finish the Black Dragon series.
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I’ve had a passion for weirdness in mundane settings since my childhood days watchingThe Addams Family in a boring suburb. I grew up with the Apollo program, but as I realized I’d never be an astronaut, I increasingly turned to writing science fiction and fantasy set on Earth. I discovered role-playing games shortly after D&D came out, but when I became bored with characters who were only after money and mayhem, I found other RPGs and began writing for them. FGU’s Bushidointroduced me to Japanese mythology, which inspired my first urban fantasy novel, The Art of Arrow Cutting, which led me to being invited to write Shadowrunnovels.
This is a collection of wonderful short stories, not a novel. It was my introduction to de Lint’s Newford, the setting of many of de Lint’s later novels and collections, a fictional composite of the best aspects of several North American cities, where beings from different mythologies co-exist with humans and interact with those who believe in them. It's such a fascinating setting, and feels so real, that I wish I could live there.
Welcome to Charles de Lint’s first collection of Newford stories. Immerse yourself in his gritty fictional city—as much a character as Jilly who paints fey wonders, fiddle player Geordie seeking his stolen beloved, the conjure man and his Tree of Tales, or Paperjack revealing fortunes. Meet Gemmins who live in abandoned cars and Katrina, a mermaid so entranced by love that she’s left the cold dark water to walk in the moonlight. Visit the music clubs, the waterfront, and the alleyways where myths and magic spill into the modern world.
Reviews: This collection of conceptually innovative, thematically simple stories proves…
I’ve had a passion for weirdness in mundane settings since my childhood days watchingThe Addams Family in a boring suburb. I grew up with the Apollo program, but as I realized I’d never be an astronaut, I increasingly turned to writing science fiction and fantasy set on Earth. I discovered role-playing games shortly after D&D came out, but when I became bored with characters who were only after money and mayhem, I found other RPGs and began writing for them. FGU’s Bushidointroduced me to Japanese mythology, which inspired my first urban fantasy novel, The Art of Arrow Cutting, which led me to being invited to write Shadowrunnovels.
Wizard is one of Seattle’s homeless magicians, a seer who tells the truth to those who need it, haunted by a nebulous menace and hiding from his past. Apart from its (often ambiguous) fantasy elements, it’s a beautifully-written guide to urban survival and to downtown Seattle (as well as the setting for my latest novels).
The fifth book in the Megan Lindholm (Robin Hobb) backlist.
Seattle: a place as magical as the Emerald City.
Subtle magic seeps through the cracks in the paving stones of the sprawling metropolis. But only the inhabitants who possess special gifts are open to the city's consciousness; finding portents in the graffiti, reading messages in the rubbish or listening to warnings in the skipping-rope chants of children.
Wizard is bound to Seattle and her magic. His gift is the Knowing - a powerful enchantment allowing him to know the truth of things; to hear the life-stories of ancient mummies locked…
I’ve had a passion for weirdness in mundane settings since my childhood days watchingThe Addams Family in a boring suburb. I grew up with the Apollo program, but as I realized I’d never be an astronaut, I increasingly turned to writing science fiction and fantasy set on Earth. I discovered role-playing games shortly after D&D came out, but when I became bored with characters who were only after money and mayhem, I found other RPGs and began writing for them. FGU’s Bushidointroduced me to Japanese mythology, which inspired my first urban fantasy novel, The Art of Arrow Cutting, which led me to being invited to write Shadowrunnovels.
War for the Oaks is a fantasy set in a very real Minneapolis (I’ve read parts of it on location) and concerns a war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts for the city’s soul. As the fey are immortal, each side needs to recruit mortals to infect them with mortality or no victory will be possible. Eddi McCandry, a rock and roll singer, is chosen to fight alongside the Seelie Court.
Eddi starts playing an active role in their strategy and grows into the hero they need. It’s difficult not to love Eddi and her new band – some mortal, some fey – and the fact that the city she’s fighting for is real makes the story even more gripping than the battle for Gondor.
Acclaimed by critics and readers on its first publication in 1987, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks is one of the novels that has defined modern urban fantasy.
Eddi McCandry sings rock and roll. But her boyfriend just dumped her, her band just broke up, and life could hardly be worse. Then, walking home through downtown Minneapolis on a dark night, she finds herself drafted into an invisible war between the faerie folk. Now, more than her own survival is at risk—and her own preferences, musical and personal, are very much…
I grew up hearing Scottish folklore told as truth, stories of spirits, warnings, and strange kindnesses passed off as everyday fact. I have always been fascinated by the idea that there is something more, something hidden just out of sight. As a child I was scared of everything, so I forced myself to watch old Hammer horror films to toughen up. It worked a bit too well and left me with a lifelong love of the dark underside of things. Now, as a stand-up comedian and writer, I have learned there can be humour in anything, and sometimes the best way to make something real is to laugh at the awful.
This is the first book I’ve read where I truly believed in a world existing alongside our own.
One where the ordinary and the supernatural live side by side and quietly shape each other, even if they don’t fully realise it. I absolutely loved the humour.
It’s a remarkable book that made me feel like I’d been pulled into another world entirely. One that’s dirtier, stranger, more magical, and just a little bit beyond understanding.
I’ve always loved fantasy. My mother told me fairy stories and I read every book of myth and legend in my local library. I’ve continued to read and love books of fantasy and magic. I guess it’s not surprising that all four of my novels and most of my short stories have a speculative aspect to them. Having grown up with the traditional view of the aged, ugly crone luring children away to their doom, I especially love stories of witches that come at the topic of witchcraft from a different angle. I live in the East of England, where the infamous witch-hunts of the seventeenth century took place.
The first in a trilogy of books of magical fantasy set in Renaissance Europe and beyond that looks at magic and witchery at an unusual slant. Centre stage is Damiano Delstrego: son of a wizard and alchemist with an inheritance of Dark Magics. Forced out by war, he goes on pilgrimage to seek the aid of the powerful witch Saara, but the road he is obliged to walk is a dark one. R. A. MacAvoy is another writer I have admired for a long time and I was very sad when ill health stopped her from writing. I believe, however, that she has started to write again, so I can but hope for new novels while recommending her older, skillful work.
This alternate history fantasy by a Nebula Award nominee follows a young alchemist's quest in Renaissance Italy under the wing of an archangel.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of the Italian Renaissance, this alternate history takes place in a world where real faith-based magic exists. Our hero is Damiano Dalstrego. He is a wizard's son, an alchemist, and the heir to dark magics. But he is also an innocent, a young scholar and musician befriended by the Archangel Raphael, who instructs him in the lute. To save his beloved city from war, Damiano leaves his cloistered life and sets out…
As a writer of children’s books, I’ve always been fascinated – not merely by the narrative, characters, and plot that form a story – but how ideas themselves spring to life and cross-pollinate to form some kind of creative endeavor, whether that’s a song, a poem, a book or anything else that provokes an emotional response. Rather than shying away from the question: "Where do you get your ideas?" I like to embrace it and search for answers myself. These books all set contexts through which the nature of imagination and ideas are explored alongside the tales they tell, and they remain an influence on the ideas I have, and the words I write.
A formative book from my childhood, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen kick-started my love of all things magic, heroic, and fantastical. Not only that, but the setting was close to where I grew up – these were locations I knew but viewed through a mythic lens. Loosely based on the legend of the Wizard of Alderley Edge, Alan Garner creates a fantasy world that feels so real as two children are pulled into an adventure where the very future of the world of men is on the line. It remains so influential on my own writing that I still return to the old dwarf caves of Fundinvale as an adult and enjoy the tale every bit as much as I did when I was a ten-year-old reading by torchlight under the duvet.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time.
"Alan Garner's fiction is something special." - Neil Gaiman
When Colin and Susan are pursued by eerie creatures across Alderley Edge, they are saved by the Wizard. He takes them into the caves of Fundindelve, where he watches over the enchanted sleep of one hundred and forty knights.
But the heart of the magic that binds them - Firefrost, also known as the Weirdstone of Brisingamen - has been lost. The Wizard has been searching for the stone for more than 100 years, but the forces…
I’ve always felt myself to be different, odd, and a bit of a loner. As a child, people said I was "too clever by half," and I both hated and loved being able to understand things that other kids did not. Being good at maths and science in a girls’ boarding school does not make you friends! Escaping all that, I became a psychologist and, after a dramatic out-of-body experience, began studying lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, psychic claims, and all sorts of weird and wonderful experiences. This is why I love all these books about exceptional children.
I had to include this first Harry Potter book because Harry is the epitome of a gifted child and I loved these books from the first.
When my own book, The Meme Machine, came out in 1999, someone rang me excitedly to tell me that my book was number 5 on Amazon!!! (There were not so many books listed on Amazon in those days!!).
I was so thrilled that, of course, I had to find out what the top four were. And guess what – they were the hardback and paperback versions of the first two Harry Potter books, which I’d never even heard of. I bought them immediately and never looked back, receiving each one in the post on its publication day.
Galloping gargoyles ... 2022 is the silver anniversary of J.K. Rowling's magical classic Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone!
The boy wizard Harry Potter has been casting a spell over young readers and their families ever since 1997. Now the first book in this unmissable series celebrates 25 years in print! The paperback edition of the tale that introduced us to Harry, Ron and Hermione has been updated and dressed in silver to mark the occasion. It's time to take the magical journey of a lifetime ...
Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping…
I’ve loved folklore and fantasy literature since I was tiny, but I’ve also had a lifelong fascination with science, history, and the natural world. As a disabled mother of two, I’ve not (yet) had the opportunity to see as much of our world as I’d like, but I love building fantasy worlds and weaving within them stories that blend a grounded earthiness with the supernatural and metaphysical. My writing always begins with a single mental image, the seed of an idea that I explore and build around until I have a full-fledged story ready to commit to paper. I love stories that break the mould, take you somewhere unexpected, and then make you never want to leave.
The OG witches of modern fantasy literature. I’ve put down Wyrd Sistersbecause it’s the first of Pratchett’s Witches books to feature the trio of Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick, but I’d list the whole series if I could. If you haven’t read them, I envy you, because you get to experience this trio and their world for the first time. Granny Weatherwax is a good witch because she has to be, but if she were to go the other way there’s no doubt she would be the greatest evil witch the Discworld has ever known. She plays cards with Death, knows the power of stories, and, most importantly, understands that being Good and Right is not the same as being Nice. Pratchett’s Witches were formative reading for me, and paved the way for many beloved reads on our shelves today.
'Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It's the other way around.'
Three witches gathered on a lonely heath. A king cruelly murdered, his throne usurped by his ambitious cousin. A child heir and the royal crown, both missing.
Witches don't have these kinds of leadership problems themselves - in fact, they don't have leaders.
Granny Weatherwax is the most highly regarded of the leaders they don't have. But even she finds that meddling in royal politics is a lot more complicated than certain playwrights would have you believe. Particularly when the blood…
I’ve always loved fantasy. My mother told me fairy stories and I read every book of myth and legend in my local library. I’ve continued to read and love books of fantasy and magic. I guess it’s not surprising that all four of my novels and most of my short stories have a speculative aspect to them. Having grown up with the traditional view of the aged, ugly crone luring children away to their doom, I especially love stories of witches that come at the topic of witchcraft from a different angle. I live in the East of England, where the infamous witch-hunts of the seventeenth century took place.
If you mention witches, most people think fantasy novels, but this is a factual history about the real life witch-hunts that took place across the East of England in the 17th Century. It unpicks the brutal and most likely self-serving crusade of the original Witchfinder General, Mathew Hopkins and the religious hysteria of the time. It is a worthy counterbalance to classic horror films such as Witchfinder General and to all the varied and imaginative fiction that has been written about witches and witchery over the centuries, my own included.
By spring 1645, two years of civil war had exacted a dreadful toll upon England. People lived in terror as disease and poverty spread, and the nation grew ever more politically divided. In a remote corner of Essex, two obscure gentlemen, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, exploited the anxiety and lawlessness of the time and initiated a brutal campaign to drive out the presumed evil in their midst. Touring Suffolk and East Anglia on horseback, they detected demons and idolators everywhere. Through torture, they extracted from terrified prisoners confessions of consorting with Satan and demonic spirits.
