Here are 100 books that Amberlough fans have personally recommended if you like
Amberlough.
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Full disclosure: I am a fantasy world nerd! I treasure my visits to these imaginary places, and I love imagining how the world goes on after the last page. I’ve spent hours pondering what would happen in Narnia after the invention of the internal combustion engine, or in Middle Earth when populations reach levels requiring building codes and infrastructure planning. (I told you I was a nerd!) Advancing fantasy technologies creates new problems, new solutions, and new parallels to our own time. The books on this list redefine our assumptions of what a fantasy world is, and what stories they have to share.
I’m a sucker for fantasy blended with industrial strife. In Michael Swanwick’s Jane, we see a character trapped in an industrialized fairy-world, forced to work in a factory building bio-mechanical dragons. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter blends biting social commentary with a thoughtful coming-of-age narrative, resulting in a powerful story that’s accumulated a stack of award wins and nominations.
Named a NEW YORK TIMES notable book of 1994, THE IRON DRAGON'S DAUGHTER tells the heartrending story of a changeling child who is kidnapped to a realm of malls and machines and enslaved in a vast, infernal factory. Ultimately she escapes and attempts to educate herself about this alien world, while being tormented by visions of the life she was denied.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve always loved a good crime drama/suspense thriller novel–the way they keep you glued to the pages, and you think you’ll just sit down for a quick couple of chapters before dinner, and the next thing you realize, it's 12am, and you’re on the last chapter. The depth of the character studies that you get with this genre is the other reason I enjoy it so much, there’s nothing worse than having main characters that are one dimensional and unreachable as a reader. I have always tried to create this kind of character depth and gripping narrative in my own books.
What I enjoyed most about this book was the story and plot that the author wove together.
This story takes thrilling, unexpected twists that kept me engaged with the characters and the plot. Its intensity is matched by its excellent pacing, delivering surprises at every turn.
Just when I thought I'd figured out where it's headed, it veers in another direction.
'An epic drama reminiscent of the best classic Hong Kong gangster films but set in a fantasy metropolis so gritty and well-imagined that you'll forget you're reading a book' KEN LIU
'Gripping!' ANN LECKIE, author of Ancillary Justice and The Raven Tower
'Lee's astute worldbuilding raises the stakes for her vivid and tautly-described action scenes' SCOTT LYNCH, author of The Lies of Locke Lamora
*****Shortlisted for the Nebula Awards, the Locus Awards, the Aurora Awards, the Sunburst Awards and an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month*****
Full disclosure: I am a fantasy world nerd! I treasure my visits to these imaginary places, and I love imagining how the world goes on after the last page. I’ve spent hours pondering what would happen in Narnia after the invention of the internal combustion engine, or in Middle Earth when populations reach levels requiring building codes and infrastructure planning. (I told you I was a nerd!) Advancing fantasy technologies creates new problems, new solutions, and new parallels to our own time. The books on this list redefine our assumptions of what a fantasy world is, and what stories they have to share.
I’m drawn to fantasy stories set in modern-day analogues because I’m fascinated to see the ways that having magic and monsters as a fact of life would shape a world from the ground up. I’m particularly interested in the impact on more mundane matters like legal contracts and labor disputes. Perhaps no one dives into this topic with as much gusto as Max Gladstone. In Three Parts Dead, we meet necromantic lawyers and witness the legal and practical repercussions of a god’s death. In lesser hands, this could easily slump into tedious details, or the intricacies might be forgotten in an attempt to ramp up the action. But Gladstone finds the perfect balance, keeping abstract concepts engaging while presenting action scenes that carry true consequences. The city of Alt Coulumb is one of my favorite fantasy settings, and the entire Craft Sequence is well-worth reading.
Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence chronicles the epic struggle to build a just society in a modern fantasy world.
A god has died, and it's up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart.
Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis's steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot.
Tara's job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As a stage combat choreographer myself, fight sequences are always important to me: they have to be believable but exciting, they have to keep up the pace so the reader is experiencing the action at the same speed as the characters—but most importantly, they have to tell a story. Action just for the sake of action always feels empty, but great fight scenes that are both exhilarating and bound to the forward momentum of the plot and emotion will stay with me for a long time. Here’s some that I still remember long after I finished the book.
This lesser-known gem was my favorite book of 2019. You take a World War II-style submarine war but throw in horrifying new supernatural powers, and then pitch it against Cthulu-style interdimensional monsters and you start to have an idea of the gloriously-insane trajectory of this book. That may sound over-the-top at a glance, but I promise this is a grounded read that’s flush with complex interweaving relationships, and an unrelenting pace that constantly throws new, bigger dangers at the characters before they’ve had a chance to catch their breath. This book is far better than it has any right to be.
Naval officer Mila Blackwood is determined to keep her country's most powerful secret - shrouding, the ability to traverse their planet in seconds through an alternate realm - out of enemy hands. But spies are everywhere: her submarine has been infiltrated by a Dhavnak agent, and her teenage brother has been seduced by an enemy soldier. When Blackwood's submarine is attacked by a monster, she and fellow sailor, Holland, are marked with special abilities, whose manifestations could end the war - but in whose favor? Forced to submit to military scientists in her paranoid and war-torn home, Blackwood soon learns…
I have studied nineteenth-century American literature and culture for more than thirty years. My friends roll their eyes when I excitedly share a passage from Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, or Kate Chopin. I wrote this book because I realized that nineteenth-century thinkers and writers have a lot to teach us about tyranny, particularly the dangers it presents to our nation. I hope you’ll find the challenge of these books as important as I do!
This book imagines a world where the United States succumbs to authoritarianism. Subsequent writers have explored this theme, but I love Lewis’s novel because it captures a precarious historical moment (the 1930s) that has a lot in common with the present day.
“Buzz” Winthrop, the politician turned dictator, whips up fears about threats to America, stressing the need to get back to the nation’s “true” values. It’s a chilling portrait of a nation that loses its way.
“The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal.”—Salon
It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
In The Ministry of Truth, I wanted to bring together two longstanding interests: dystopian fiction and the history of totalitarianism. Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course a landmark work in both categories. In trying to explain how and why Orwell came to write his masterpiece, and its subsequent influence on fiction and political thought, I read a huge range of books that wrestled with the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism and asked how they were able to hold sway, physically and mentally, over tens of millions of people. Many of them are gripping and valuable but these five in particular make for great companions to 1984.
The identity of “Murray Constantine” wasn’t uncovered until the 1980s, long after Burdekin’s death, but only a woman could have created such a persuasive patriarchal dystopia, half a century before The Handmaid’s Tale. Burdekin’s futuristic Nazi empire, a brutally misogynist quasi-religion, is dying slowly from within and an English airman named Alfred has been given explosive proof that Hitler was not in fact a Thor-like deity. Though the plot fizzles out, the ideas are extraordinarily ahead of their time.
Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, Swastika Night projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit” who asks, “How could this have happened?”
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I'm a scholar with a deep interest in the critical study of propaganda and its role in shaping public perceptions of terrorism, particularly in Spain. My passion for this topic stems from the recognition that propaganda is pervasive in today’s world and that accusations of terrorism are often deployed strategically to delegitimize a society’s political opponents.
By examining how groups are framed as “terrorists” and unlearning the biased narratives that surround them, we can begin to understand their true nature beyond superficial prejudice. This perspective drives my commitment to exploring media, political discourse, and historical context critically, making me well-positioned to recommend works that illuminate the complex interplay between propaganda, terrorism, and societal perception.
Wolin’s concept of “inverted totalitarianism” helped me understand how democracy can erode from within, without tanks in the streets.
I admire his fearless critique of corporate power and its subtle grip on democratic institutions. The book gave me a framework to interpret post-9/11 political shifts in the U.S. It’s haunting, prescient, and intellectually exhilarating.
Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliche. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public…
I have been a professor of politics and law for decades, first at Harvard and then Oxford, and so on; I spent these decades trying to understand what makes democracy work. I think we’ve been focusing on the wrong things, and as a political and legal theorist, I want to help us think about a better way forward—one we can carve for ourselves every day of our lives.
I was impressed by Tim Snyder’s ability to distill decades of academic knowledge of dictatorship and autocracy into very important but simple lessons that we need to pay attention to now and always.
An historian, Tim Snyder, is astute at identifying the legal ‘slides’ used by autocrats to gradually move democratic countries into non-democratic configurations. This is the
kind of book I wish were in the required section of high school reading lists.
'A sort of survival book, a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close' Rachel Maddow
'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer
History does not repeat, but it does instruct.
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised…
Throughout the forty-one years (thirty-four of them at Oxford) I spent as a university teacher, I taught a course on Communist government and politics (latterly ‘Communist and post-Communist government’). Communist-ruled systems were never less than highly authoritarian (when they became politically pluralist, they were, by definition, no longer Communist), and in some countries at particular times they were better described as totalitarian. That was notably true of Stalin’s Soviet Union, especially from the early 1930s to the dictator’s death in 1953. The books I’ve written prior to The Human Factor include The Rise and Fall of Communism and The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age.
Fascism and Communism purported to explain all social and political phenomena and, on that basis, justified their authoritarian or totalitarian rule. The term ‘fascist’ tends to be loosely applied to intolerant and autocratic political behaviour, but the outstandingly lucid, and highly readable, book by Robert Paxton not only surveys fascism in practice – in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and in fascist movements and parties in many different countries – it also shows what its distinctive components are. What he calls the ‘mobilizing passions’ of fascism include the glorification of war and violence, expansionism, racism, a fixation on national solidarity, rejection of the legitimacy of diverse interests and values within a society, and, not least, a cult of the heroic leader, with the leader’s instincts counting for more than reasoned, evidence-based argument.
Fascism was the major political invention of the twentieth century and the source of much of its pain. How can we try to comprehend its allure and its horror? Is it a philosophy, a movement, an aesthetic experience? What makes states and nations become fascist?
Acclaimed historian Robert O. Paxton shows that in order to understand fascism we must look at it in action - at what it did, as much as what it said it was about. He explores its falsehoods and common threads; the social and political base that allowed it to prosper; its leaders and internal struggles;…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I've been aware since childhood how people are battered by political and social forces. My family lived in Taiwan in the 1950s, when it was an impoverished, insecure place. Later, back in D.C., the Civil Rights movement and nascent counterculture and my mother's death deepened my conviction that conflict and fragility are facts of life. Novels like these five, whose characters face overwhelming situations, nurture our reserves of empathy. In my memoir of adolescence, I reexamined how, at 16, I tried to handle the jigsaw pieces of looming adulthood, gay panic, family tragedy, and social upheaval. That needed all the empathy—for myself—that I could muster.
Set in Dublin in what could be the present—though it could be any city in a liberal democracy and any time in the coming years—this is a frighteningly believable story of the arrival and imposition of fascism. The focus is on one normal suburban family whose first response is to shrug. They think, "It doesn't concern us," but slowly, and then sometimes in quick shocks, it does.
The writing is understated. But the description of an incremental, daily drip-drip of tightening repression almost made me feel short of breath. There is no happy ending. It's not escape reading—more a cautionary tale.
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 • NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"A prophetic masterpiece." — Ron Charles, Washington Post
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she…
