100 Books Like Empire of Sand

I absolutely love Sharon Shinn’s writing, both her luscious, sophisticated prose and the way she writes relationships between characters. She hits the perfect balance between well-planned, interesting plots, rich fantasy worlds, and the exact right amount of romantic subplot and character development.

This book—which follows a group of magic-wielding mystics and the reluctant, militaristic King’s Riders assigned to protect them as they travel the land, investigating a rise in anti-magic sentiment—is my favorite of her books, not least because it has some of the coziest found family dynamics and campfire friendships to be found outside of classics like The Lord of the Rings!

Kristen Britain’s Green Rider is an adventure that takes place in a carefully crafted medieval world.

What’s notable is the way Britain integrates medieval culture and tradition into the story. From the honor code of the Green Riders to the standard of loyalty and virtue, the novel is steeped in values commonly held in the medieval era. This adds authenticity to the story.

The series also introduces ‘fantasy flair’ in the Eletians, a group of people I could closely associate with the Elves in my own book.

Do you know what makes life-and-death drama better? Throwing it in a pot with a healthy dash of family drama and stirring vigorously. Rachel Aaron understands that, and I love that almost all of her series effortlessly blends the importance of apocalyptic disasters with the difficulty of dysfunctional familial relationships.

And sometimes–just sometimes–the characters get a little healing along the way.

Forging Hephaestus is a fantastic book about a tenuous treaty between superheroes and villains in a four-color world.

Hephaestus AKA Tori Rivas is a new supervillain and is learning the ropes from the most powerful one of them all, Fornax. Fornax is a lot nicer guy than you'd expect from the most terrifying of all villains, which shows this world is a lot more complicated than it seems.

I love the complexity, deep characterization, and thickness of this book. It’s over six hundred pages and full of fantastic details about a complicated but believable superhero world. By the end, I wanted to read a dozen more giant-sized volumes.

Mixing deep archival scholarship with brilliant storytelling, Dalrymple transports the reader into the final days of the Mughal Empire and its last emperor. The story centers on Delhi during the mutiny against British rule in 1857, the last great attempt by the Indians to throw off their European overlords until Gandhi. What begins with hope ultimately ends in tragedy, for the Mughal poet-ruler who fails to grasp his chance to change history, and the brilliant civilization his empire had fostered.

This is a survey of all Mughal architecture, in which only a few pages are devoted to the Taj Mahal directly, but for anyone who wants to understand the Taj not as something unique and inexplicable, but as a logical part of a longer tradition of design, this book is essential reading. While there are other surveys of Mughal architecture on offer, a major strength of this one is the author’s inclusion of many minor and provincial buildings that provide a wider context for the famous stand-out masterpieces like the Taj. 

This is an anthology of all of the written sources on the Taj Mahal from the period of its construction in the 17th century. It brings together translations of every description or mention of the building in Mughal court histories, or accounts by foreign travellers, and explains all of the historical and religious inscriptions that are written on the building itself. The book is meant for the serious student and lacks narrative flow; but the focus exclusively on written sources dating from the same time as the Taj really helps you understand it in its own time. 

Dalrymple's wonderful book is a saga of the enduring love affair – cultural, aesthetic, imaginative – that a certain kind of Briton enjoyed with India.

At the heart of it, though, lies the tragic figure of Khair un-Nissa, a Mughal princess who won the heart and soul of James Kirkpatrick, the resident at Hyderabad, and bore him two children, yet whose life in dissipated European society after his early death is symbolic of female vulnerability in empire.

She died, aged twenty-seven, in 1813.

Nur Jahan was one of the great queens of India, but I had never learned about her even in my studies at university.

I felt absolutely transported into her life, ambitions, and loves through this riveting novel that is so poetic you’ll want to read it in your bath with the door locked and a candle lit. This book feels like a window into the life of a woman you wish was your mother, your sister, your best friend.

It’s the first of the trilogy, and a magnificent journey into ancient India and the history of the Taj Mahal.

If Eastern and Central Europe are often ignored in historical fiction in the sixteenth century, that’s even more true of lands east of the Ural Mountains. This gorgeous study of Mughal India in the reigns of Emperor Humayun and his son Akbar charts the story of Adhira, a temple dancer in Rajasthan. Born during one of her homeland’s rare rainstorms, Adhira bears the weight of her father’s expectation that she will carry on the kathak tradition to which he has devoted his life. Through the story of Adhira and her brother Mahendra, Duva—herself a practitioner of kathak—plunges us into the highs and lows of temple life and reveals a deep understanding of the religious dance she portrays.