Books like A Monsoon Rising — picked by fans

Part queer love story, part sci-fi mystery, wholly delightful; this is my comfort read when the world begins to look too bleak and hopeless. This is another story with beautiful worldbuilding, and fascinating details, but the real beauty of it is the characters—complex, flawed, hurting, but loving each other through it.

The story is gentle, with enough intrigue to hold your interest but never mile-a-minute action, and one of the sweetest love-stories I’ve ever read, but the book never veers into the saccharine—as much as it is a love story, it’s also a story about the messiness of being human—impulsive, thoughtless sometimes, hurting and hurt, but trying ultimately to do the right thing, no matter the cost. 

I read this before I read the preceding trilogy: Phèdre’s Trilogy, and was well drawn in without the background knowledge that may have come from reading the two series in order. I later did read Phèdre’s Trilogy and enjoyed it, but it was Imriel’s Trilogy that really captured me. I love that while most Fantasy series will focus on aggressive politics and war, these series are more about the arts and diplomacy and humans being very human in all their facets. Imriel was a captivating character who I was eager to follow along with as I discovered the world he lived in.

For my bookworm girlies who long for a historical adventure. This was one of the first historical fantasy/romance books I ever read and I loved it. I remember really loving the main character because not only was she bookish and unintentionally funny, she was smart, awkward, and relatable. The story gives the reader a chance to dive into a culture you may not be completely familiar with and that accounts for half the intrigue right there! I love the lore, the supernatural elements, the history, the action. It’s a story that ticks all the boxes for fun reads and I’d encourage anyone who enjoys those things to give it a shot.  

I am so impressed by Pirateaba’s worldbuilding. While there are some fantasy staples in the series, like dragons and dwarves, there are also plenty of lesser-seen races, like gnolls and djinni, and some that are completely unique creations, like the Antinium and the Gazers.

What’s more, all of these races feel like they have their own identities and shared culture, and then, on top of that, individuals from each race are distinct! Two gnolls won’t necessarily see eye-to-eye just because they’re gnolls.

The character work in this book is so good.

A shifter and a human come together to rescue the human’s kidnapped daughter.

The human was married to the woman who had been promised to the shifter which makes for lots of conflict between them. This is the first book in the series.

I love the worldbuilding and the questionable morality of the shifters.

Madeline Hunter is the pseudonym of an art historian who teaches at the university level, and that expert knowledge translates well in her books.

The little bits and pieces of art detail she adds to her story worlds really bring them to life. There’s also an element of mystery that deepens the plot. The Seducer is the first book in The Seducer series, and while it’s not the first of her books that I’ve read, the story of Diane Albret and Daniel St. John is the one that made me a fan.

The heroine is a recent boarding school graduate, and the hero is her far more experienced guardian. In the modern-day world, this premise is all kinds of creepy. The power dynamics between this couple were so far off, I wasn’t sure how Hunter could make this a romance.

But based on the historical details built into the world,… show more.

My appreciation for this book snuck up on me. I thoroughly enjoyed the first third or so, in which we are introduced to Fetter–destined to assassinate his godlike father–and are introduced to the fascinating city in which the story is set. But I wasn’t as enthralled with what I took, at the time, for a bit of a meandering middle section. However, the utterly creative and mind-twisting final fifth of the book won me back over.

With time, I’ve come to appreciate the subtle thematic and character work in those middle chapters. Of all the books on this list, this one pushes the boundaries of fantasy the most, both in worldbuilding and characterization, but it’s a masterclass in both, and I hope it has a massive impact on the genre going forward.

Cyteen won a Hugo Award in 1989 and pushed the envelope on both world building and character development. For me though, it was the author’s exploration of what it means to be human that made this book one of my all-time favourites. 

In Cyteen, there are born humans and made people. Some of the made people are clones of a particularly powerful individual, but most are created to perform a function. These lower-ranked people are taught everything they need to know by ‘tape’, while they sleep. 

The book asks some deep philosophical questions about what makes a person human, and whether any of us have the right to create ‘sub-humans’ for our own benefit. These are powerful questions that still beg for answers.

This book is a masterclass on how to write fantasy. The worldbuilding is immaculate, the characters are complex with big personalities, and I was laughing out loud (not an exaggeration) from the first page.

Rasia and Nico are Black girls who know what they want. They constantly clash with each other, never giving an inch when they can take a mile, and I want every lover of fantasy to read this book.

I discovered the Pearl Saga (a trilogy) via Van Lustbader taking up the reins on Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels. While I was reading these books, I was waiting to hear from Voyager (Harper Collins) regarding an epic fantasy novel I wrote, which featured in its climactic scenes a girl using crystals to trap a dragon in a cage-like device inside a mountain. There was a delay in the publication of the third book of the Pearl Saga, and when it came out, it featured a girl holding a ‘crystal’ before a dragon, and it was called The Cage of Nine Banestones. My heart sank, but it turned out that the delay was related to the death of Van Lustbader’s father.

The trilogy begun in ‘Ring’ is for some brooding and self-indulgent, but for me it was a triumph of worldbuilding and alien realia, with technology and sorcery vying… show more.