Here are 100 books that Chronicles of the Black Company fans have personally recommended if you like
Chronicles of the Black Company.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
My name is Thomas Tarasios and I'm a fantasy author. I was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games growing up, particularly I to IX, and as a voracious fantasy reader I've made it my business to find novels that deliver that 'Final Fantasy feeling' (eccentric ensemble cast, adventure, hard magic system, grim yet fun, etc.), scouring the web, message boards and Reddit for recommendations on this topic and reading the suggested books. When it came time to write my own fantasy series, I set out to write as if it were an original Final Fantasy game—a fan novelization of an awesome new Final Fantasy game that doesn't actually exist as a game!
I love this book because it’s basically The Blues Brothers combined with Dungeons and Dragons. How did Nicholas Eames ever come up with that concept, and make it work so well?
In this breakneck madcap quest, retired hero Clay Cooper sets out to get his original adventuring ‘band’ back together one by one in order to go on one last mission to save his daughter. The jokes had me guffawing, the action had me riveted, and the structuring left me open-mouthed.
It reminds me of Final Fantasy because once again we have an eccentric ensemble cast going on an adventure quest with magic and monsters galore…but not only that: Eames is also on record as a Final Fantasy fan and names some of his characters after Final Fantasy characters, along with sticking in some other Easter eggs related to the franchise.
'An outstanding debut which will make you laugh and cry and hold your breath. This is a book that has it all' - K. J. Parker Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best - the meanest, dirtiest, most feared and admired crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld. But their glory days are long past; the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk - or a combination of the three. Then a former bandmate turns up at Clay's door with a plea for help: his daughter Rose is trapped in a city…
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 been writing fantasy for two decades now and still, I can’t resist a foul-mouthed rogue with a grubby soul. They’re usually the most entertaining characters to write and in the long days of plugging away at a book, they’re often the ones that remind you what’s so fun about the job. When I started Stranger of Tempest it was (pretty much solely) with that in mind – I wanted a disparate band of crazed, badass idiots to go on an adventure with and see where it took me. Of course, as I got to know them I found there was more to their tales than that, but it was fun right to the end!
Chel isn’t a man cut out to be a hard-nosed mercenary, but he falls in with a badass crew and the resulting exploits and squabbling prove highly entertaining for the rest of us even if he’s miserable throughout much of it! It’s a simple tale of being chased across the country by assassins, all told with foul-mouthed and engaging aplomb, so what’s not to love?
Dark, thrilling, and hilarious, The Black Hawks is an epic adventure perfect for fans of Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch.
Life as a knight is not what Vedren Chel imagined. Bound by oath to a dead-end job in the service of a lazy step-uncle, Chel no longer dreams of glory - he dreams of going home.
When invaders throw the kingdom into turmoil, Chel finds opportunity in the chaos: if he escorts a stranded prince to safety, Chel will be released from his oath.
All he has to do is drag the brat from one side of the country to…
I’ve been writing fantasy for two decades now and still, I can’t resist a foul-mouthed rogue with a grubby soul. They’re usually the most entertaining characters to write and in the long days of plugging away at a book, they’re often the ones that remind you what’s so fun about the job. When I started Stranger of Tempest it was (pretty much solely) with that in mind – I wanted a disparate band of crazed, badass idiots to go on an adventure with and see where it took me. Of course, as I got to know them I found there was more to their tales than that, but it was fun right to the end!
The Raven is your classic band of mercs, a found-family of warriors caught up in world-ending levels of chaos. This is much more 90s style fantasy and unashamedly so – serious, sword-swinging, spell-casting stuff. As a result, you have to buy into that a bit given how the genre has changed, but at the same time, the series is all about the consequences of actions rather than any pretence about happily ever after so there’s real meat to it.
ELITE, UNSTOPPABLE ... AND HIRED TO DO THE UNTHINKABLE
The Raven are an elite. Formed of six men and an elf, they're swords for hire in the wars that have torn their land apart. For years their only loyalty has been to themselves, and to their code.
But that time is coming to an end. The Wytch Lords have escaped and The Raven find themselves fighting for the Dark College of magic, on a mission which soon becomes a race for the secret location of Dawnthief. It's a spell - one created to end the…
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’ve been writing fantasy for two decades now and still, I can’t resist a foul-mouthed rogue with a grubby soul. They’re usually the most entertaining characters to write and in the long days of plugging away at a book, they’re often the ones that remind you what’s so fun about the job. When I started Stranger of Tempest it was (pretty much solely) with that in mind – I wanted a disparate band of crazed, badass idiots to go on an adventure with and see where it took me. Of course, as I got to know them I found there was more to their tales than that, but it was fun right to the end!
I suspect there are few authors who know more about using medieval weapons than Miles (Christian) Cameron. At times there’s a nerdy level of detail in the arms and armour here (one I enjoyed rather than was put off by), but that’s not all there is to this tale. Firstly the fight scenes are just outstanding, breathless, brutal, shocking, and exciting – some of the best I’ve read in any book ever. Secondly, the company led by the Red Knight is a great crew of awful people; flawed, mad, or outright bastards, they’re far from cardboard cut-outs and the book is all the richer for the humanity they display.
Forget George and the Dragon. Forget Sir Lancelot and tales of Knightly exploits. This is dirty, bloody work. This is violent, visceral action. This is a mercenary knight as you've never seen one before. Twenty eight florins a month is a huge price to pay, for a man to stand between you and the Wild. Twenty eight florins a month is nowhere near enough when a wyvern's jaws snap shut on your helmet in the hot stink of battle, and the beast starts to rip the head from your shoulders. But if standing and fighting is hard, leading a company…
I’ve loved all kinds of science fiction since I was a child, and always enjoy discovering new worlds, and the frisson of danger that inevitably accompanies the discovery. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and to write fiction and non-fiction. My two novels are An Accident of Birth, and the space opera, Galactic Alliance: Betrayal, and I’ve written a non-fiction reference book Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.
Ian Banks is as well known for his science fiction as for his mainstream and literary fiction. This is the first book in his Cultureseries, in which the Culture is a galaxy-wide advanced technological society with complex attitudes to how it should interact with other civilizations. The Culture is at war with the Idrians. Consider Phlebas is the story of a mercenary lone operative on a quest to retrieve a stranded Culture AI mind from an abandoned world to further the Idrian cause. The problem is that he is not the only one going there to find it, and nobody is playing nicely – not even the stranded AI mind. The wide-ranging inventiveness, subtle humour, and gritty realism of this story makes for highly compelling reading.
"Dazzlingly original." -- Daily Mail"Gripping, touching and funny." -- TLSThe war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza,…
I’ve always loved military history. Over time, the ancient Greeks won out. They have the coolest equipment! The more you find out about their culture, the more interesting they are. I studied Classics and English Lit. as an undergrad and went to Athens for my Master's. My PhD research was on ancient Greek warfare and historiography–how the Greeks wrote history. That became part of my first book, Military Leaders and Sacred Space in Classical Greek Warfare. I’ve taught in several universities, including courses on warfare, mythology, art, and historiography. I run the Panoply Vase Animation Project, which makes educational animations from ancient antiquities. I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw.
I love Xenophon's Anabasis, and it’s part of the reason I devoted my life to ancient Greece. Imagine a mercenary army who’ve gone to help in someone else’s war. They get trapped, their leaders are killed, and now they have to fight their way home. That’s Xenophon’s Anabasis, or Journey Up Country, written by a man who lived through it, essentially inventing a new genre of writing as he did so.
It’s a brutal read in some ways, as a lot of terrible things happen, but it’s also a story of survival and adventure. It’s a rip-roaring insight into what it was like to go on a campaign in antiquity and what it was like to be part of an ancient army in extraordinary circumstances.
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
After writing the Dilemma, I was struck by how many readers’ feedback posed this question, What would I have done?In the process of writing the book, whilst I created the story around this one particular big fat problem, I little realised how it would resonate with so many, and also have such divided – and deeply personal responses. I’ve since become increasingly fascinated by the many ‘sliding door’ moments we experience in our lives requiring split-second decisions which may (in retrospect) have been ill-considered but by then it’s too late to ‘wind back time.’ All we can do is learn to live with consequences, however damaging they may be.
Another novel set in WW2, this dark story delves into how far a man will go to secure his survival – and the guilt (and unhappiness) he must subsequently live with as a result of his arrogance in believing his money and status gives him certain privileges. Wealthy lawyer Chavel is a prisoner in occupied France. His Nazi gaolers decree three men are to be executed, at the prisoners’ discretion. The men draw lots and when Chavel’s name is drawn he offers his fortune to anyone who will take his place. A dying man agrees. What unravels after war’s end, and Chavel is released, offers him a chance for redemption for his cowardice.
From the author of the classics Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, a morally complex tale about a man at the mercy of deadly forces while being held in a German prison camp during World War II. Featuring an introduction by the author and two other story ideas from his archives.
When Jean-Louis Chauvel, a French lawyer incarcerated in a German prison camp, is informed by his captors that three prisoners must die, he devises a plan for survival. Offering everything he owns to a fellow prisoner if he will take Chauvel’s place, he manages to escape the…
Like the widows in The Widows’ Wine Club, I’m getting on. Unlike them, I’ve been a writer for forty years, often hunched over a keyboard, ignoring people. Amazingly, though, I managed to have a happy marriage and make some great friends. Phew! Because I’ve needed friends, especially since my husband died. Looking back, I’m interested to see that I didn’t instantly take to some of my closest buddies. Circumstances threw us together, and we got to know and like and love each other. I explore this in my book.
Again, this has everything I like in a book, characters I care about, a great page-turning plot, a fight for what’s right, and a beautiful romantic thread.
By amazing coincidence, it’s also about inspiring librarians, two very different women who join forces to bring books to people who need them. Clara Button, recently widowed and under pressure to be respectable, is very different from racy unmarried Ruby Munroe, but the two form a strong bond grounded in mutual respect.
Based on historical fact, it tells the story of the underground library, built in the disused Bethnal Green tube station in 1944 when the Blitz was wreaking havoc in wartime London. Feel-good fiction at its best. Brill!
Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While the world remains at war, in East London Clara has created the country's only underground library, built over the tracks in the disused Bethnal Green tube station. Down here a secret community thrives: with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a cafe and a theatre offering shelter, solace and escape from the bombs that fall above.
Along with her glamorous best friend and library assistant Ruby Munroe, Clara ensures the library is the beating heart of life underground. But as the war drags on,…
I am an author, poet, and visual artist. These interests converge in my approach to literature. I think that visual and psychological descriptions of environments and circumstances are essential to enlivening the narrative and setting its tone. Often in modern literature this is diluted in favor of straightforward accounts. I believe that a story is never told with any complete objectivity but has a psychological context that must be highlighted. In addition, vivid visual descriptions greatly assist the reader in inhabiting the world of the story as seen from the characters’ points of view.
In the forests of France near the Belgian border during World War II, a French soldier is stationed in a bunker with his squad members.
They are ordered not to leave their posts and to be on the lookout for German tanks. Nothing happens for months except a long, snowy winter. The protagonist experiences a sense of liberation in this rural isolation that he relishes. His environment appears timeless, forever suspended in a gray, benevolent limbo filled with snow, mist, and conifers. He wishes his post would never end.
I love this book because it describes an introvert’s ideal environment: ensconcement, privacy, silence, freedom from larger society, and nature. It contains some of the most unique descriptions of splendid aloneness in the woods I have ever read.
In the Ardennes Forest on the Begian border the French guns point north-east, awaiting the German onslaught. One reinforced concrete blockhouse in the heart of the forest is manned, this winter of 1939/40, by Lieutenant Grange with three men, who live in a chalet built over it. cut off from the rest of the world, their senses heightened to capture the sounds and smells of the forest, the men create their own security as autumn turns to winter. Later, though, when winter turns to spring, when the sap rises and the panzer divisions attack, Lieutenant Grange meets the fate he…
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
I’ve always been fascinated by history, by the way that the past informs the present, how it makes us who we are. And I’ve found myself drawn, as a reader and as a writer, towards those stories that incorporate some element of magic into the past. I’ve written two magical historical novels. And my third book, which I hope to be finished with soon, is a fabulist tale set in the future, which I like to say is history that hasn’t happened yet.
As someone writing a post-apocalyptic retelling of the biblical Book of Esther, I was immediately drawn to this counterfactual history set amidst an isolated Eastern European nation of Turkic warrior Jews. Called the “Jewish Game of Thrones” the book goes deep into a magical alternative universe that will have you hungering for a sequel.
What if an empire of Jewish warriors that really existed in the Middle Ages had never fallen—and was the only thing standing between Hitler and his conquest of Russia?
Eastern Europe, August 1942. The Khazar kaganate, an isolated nation of Turkic warrior Jews, lies between the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Khazar Sea (the Caspian). It also happens to lie between a belligerent nation to the west that the Khazars call Germania—and a city the rest of the world calls Stalingrad.
After years of Jewish refugees streaming across the border from Europa, fleeing the war, Germania launches its…
