100 Books Like Cradle of Sea and Soil

As a kid, I was hooked on the vast wide-open freedom of this story. The notions of hidden treasure maps, buried fortunes, stealthy smugglers and dangerous pirates affected me in profoundly positive ways, stimulating a wanderlust and a love of adventure.

Although Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson set this swashbuckling tale on the south coast of England and on the elusive “Treasure Island” in the Caribbean, it was inspired by his childhood experiences in Scotland, most notably trips with his dad to rocky islands and promontories (RLS’s father was a lighthouse engineer who designed and built many iconic lighthouses).

When my father took the five-year-old me to The Admiral Benbow en route to a family holiday in Cornwall, I was amazed to find that the inn was a real place. It felt bristlingly alive to me, for this was the same inn where Billy Bones had lodged with the treasure… show more.

I must start, of course, with the quintessential pirate fantasy book.

Many might not be aware that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film was loosely adapted from this 1987 novel by Tim Powers. Anybody who knows the genre and is asked for a pirate fantasy book most likely brings up this one first. It’s the clearest yet expression of a rarified genre, and something with few imitators.

Expect to be entertained with high-seas piracy, ship battles, jungles, dark voodoo, ghost ships, and zombies as you follow Jack Shandy on the quest for the Fountain of Youth. Blackbeard, played wonderfully by Ian McShane in the film, proves a foreboding antagonist with supernatural designs.

Long John Silver isn’t a novel but a graphic novel series.

Set twenty years after Treasure Island, and featuring the man himself, what follows is a dark, adventurous tale, an expedition to find a lost city of riches deep in the Amazon. For a series with relatively brief entries, the story takes its time, setting up sharp characters, a moody, tense atmosphere, and laying the seeds for future rivalries and betrayals.

The artwork follows these moods, rich or muted, sparse or dense as needs be, and some of the larger panels are truly impressive.
For an ominous, well-paced adventure, focused on its character work and simmering tensions, look no further than Long John Silver. Particularly recommended for fans of the superlative pirate show Black Sails (itself a pseudo-prequel to Treasure Island).

Another of my cheat picks, but I feel they are both following the spirit of the list (and, more importantly, my own enthusiasm).

Here is a maritime fantasy set in a blustery region much colder than the tropical Caribbean. No, this is grim-up-north fiction – and I wasn’t surprised one bit to find the author is from Yorkshire.

The Tide Child series is a uniquely fascinating one, set in a dark, matriarchal world, dense with rotting pink and purple plants, where the “corpselights” of sacrificed children hang from ships built from the bones of sea dragons, where slavery is rife, and the faces of crews are scoured by wind and freezing brine.
Don’t expect a great deal of joy in these books. But they are nonetheless adventurous, fantastical, and exciting. I just wish they’d get a bit warmer... brrrrr.

This is an oldie but a goodie. There are not many accessible books about the earliest years of Spanish colonization, but this is probably one of the best. With a terrific narrative style, Wilson showcases the years of Columbus's leadership at the head of the earliest colonizing efforts, and the increasing dissatisfaction of Spanish colonists towards Columbus, who was seen by many as a tyrant. In addition to this, Wilson reads between the lines of Spanish documents, and with the help of archaeological evidence, provides the reader with insightful interpretations of indigenous life, actions, and motivations.

Taíno scholar José Barreiro uses fiction to illuminate what historical sources cannot: how Indigenous people reacted and adapted to Spanish colonization of the Caribbean.

Barreiro spent years researching the life of Guaikán, alias Diego Colón, a Loku Taíno youth briefly mentioned in several Spanish accounts.

By telling Guaikán’s story in the form of a journal written decades after Spanish arrival in the Caribbean, Barreiro vividly narrates the young man’s varied experiences, from his life in Guanahaní before Spanish arrival, to being taken captive by Columbus, to living in the Spanish colonial city of Santo Domingo.

Most importantly, Barreiro movingly conveys how such an individual may have felt about the cataclysmic changes that accompanied European conquest. 

Although I captain my own lake boat, I knew very little about ancient nautical sailing and warfare when I began writing Fire on Dark Water. Benerson Little’s book, The Sea Rover’s Practice, taught me about different types of crafts, weapons, battle tactics, sea villains, ship routines, sailor superstitions, methods of stealth attack, treatment of prisoners, and even the types of food eaten on board ship throughout 1630 – 1730. It was a very valuable resource.

This has often been recommended for boys (including by me) but, since there is no such thing as exclusively boy books and girl books, I’m calling this a good book period – with a highly entertaining and deeply endearing adolescent-ish boy, surrounded by a robust cast of supporting characters, at its center. More vignettes than plot, it is rooted in character and voice – in this case, the rare and highly effective use of the second voice. Tonally, it’s a callback to the adventures of boyhood captured in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and the mostly harmless incorrigibility of the boy protagonist as he moves between home, school, and community (the community, in this case, being rural Jamaica), getting into trouble and growing up. It’s the heart and humour for me!

Pity Bertram Francis. After more than a decade in the United Kingdom, the protagonist of Caryl Phillips 1986 novel has returned to his home – an unnamed island in the Caribbean – on the eve of independence. But in seeking to find a place for himself, Bertram quickly discovers that long-simmering resentments and petty grudges (particularly on the part of the island’s soon-to-be prime minister) might very well undermine his high-minded commitment to the nation’s future. But is Bertram’s own idealism also part of the problem, manifesting itself in part as a kind of smug elitism born of his studies in the metropole? Exploring the fraught space between obligation, dependency, and autonomy (in matters of state as well as of the heart), this supple novel and its complex protagonist will linger long after you’ve finished reading.

Set in a fictional town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast during the 1950’s “violencia,” this novella portrays the seemingly mundane life of an anonymous retired military officer and his wife. The aging couple struggles against poverty, government corruption, and an overwhelming feeling of insignificance. As the colonel’s life loses meaning, he eventually realizes that he has nothing left but the rooster that he is readying for a cockfight. I read this novella after training with the Colombian Navy in Cartagena, and it took me only a few pages to realize that García Márquez is a genius.