Here are 51 books that The Blacktongue Thief fans have personally recommended if you like
The Blacktongue Thief.
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I write and read fantasy that doesn’t play safe—where magic is messy, divine, rotten, or reborn in mud. I’m obsessed with stories that walk barefoot through forgotten folklore, eerie townships, and mythic detours. The Fallow Swallow grew from this exact craving: for fantasy that’s personal, poetic, and just a little unwell. I gravitate toward tales that embrace magical realism, morally grey characters, and dark humour—and these books helped shape my voice as a writer.
Reading this was like drinking tea with a ghost in a dusty library—charming, eerie, and wonderfully slow.
Clarke's ability to mix historical fiction with brooding, folkloric magic was inspiring. I admired how it builds tension not with battles, but with manners, contracts, and impossible choices. It taught me patience in worldbuilding and in life.
Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me The year is 1806. England is beleaguered by the long war with Napoleon, and centuries have passed since practical magicians faded into the nation's past. But scholars of this glorious history discover that one remains: the reclusive Mr Norrell whose displays of magic send a thrill through the country. Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of…
India Muerte and the Ship of the Dead
by
Set Sytes,
After a night of misadventure, a roguish street lad from Mexico Island wakes up aboard a legendary ship crewed by skeletons. In search of the father he’s never met—a great mound of treasure would be nice, too—India sails the fantastical Caribbean on the Ship of the Dead, exploring the colonial…
I write and read fantasy that doesn’t play safe—where magic is messy, divine, rotten, or reborn in mud. I’m obsessed with stories that walk barefoot through forgotten folklore, eerie townships, and mythic detours. The Fallow Swallow grew from this exact craving: for fantasy that’s personal, poetic, and just a little unwell. I gravitate toward tales that embrace magical realism, morally grey characters, and dark humour—and these books helped shape my voice as a writer.
This is the installment where things truly darken, and for that reason, it’s the one that stayed with me.
The rebellion, the frustration, the looming dread—this book captured adolescence and tyranny with terrifying accuracy. Also: Dolores Umbridge. Never have I so thoroughly *loved* to *hate* a character. It deepened my respect for fantasy that dares to simmer.
The fifth adventure in the spellbinding Harry Potter saga - the series that changed the world of books forever
Dark times have come to Hogwarts. After the Dementors' attack on his cousin Dudley, Harry Potter knows that Voldemort will stop at nothing to find him. There are many who deny the Dark Lord's return, but Harry is not alone: a secret order gathers at Grimmauld Place to fight against the Dark forces.
Harry must allow Professor Snape to teach him how to protect himself from Voldemort's savage assaults on his mind. But they are growing stronger by the day and…
I write and read fantasy that doesn’t play safe—where magic is messy, divine, rotten, or reborn in mud. I’m obsessed with stories that walk barefoot through forgotten folklore, eerie townships, and mythic detours. The Fallow Swallow grew from this exact craving: for fantasy that’s personal, poetic, and just a little unwell. I gravitate toward tales that embrace magical realism, morally grey characters, and dark humour—and these books helped shape my voice as a writer.
This was one of the first books that showed me fantasy could be bold and heretical.
The world was so rich—daemons, armored bears, oppressive religions—and Lyra felt like a character who’d been waiting to burst off the page for centuries. It’s a coming-of-age tale wrapped in cosmic questions and rebellion, and it sparked something in me that’s never gone out.
Philip Pullman invites you into a dazzling world where souls walk beside their humans as animal companions and powerful forces clash over the nature of the universe.
When fearless young Lyra uncovers a sinister plot involving kidnapped children and a mysterious substance called Dust, she sets out on a daring quest from Oxford to the frozen Arctic. With armored bears, witch queens, and a truth-telling compass as her allies, Lyra must face choices that will shape not just her destiny—but that of countless worlds. A thrilling blend of adventure, philosophy, and wonder, perfect for curious minds.
India Muerte and the Ship of the Dead
by
Set Sytes,
After a night of misadventure, a roguish street lad from Mexico Island wakes up aboard a legendary ship crewed by skeletons. In search of the father he’s never met—a great mound of treasure would be nice, too—India sails the fantastical Caribbean on the Ship of the Dead, exploring the colonial…
I write and read fantasy that doesn’t play safe—where magic is messy, divine, rotten, or reborn in mud. I’m obsessed with stories that walk barefoot through forgotten folklore, eerie townships, and mythic detours. The Fallow Swallow grew from this exact craving: for fantasy that’s personal, poetic, and just a little unwell. I gravitate toward tales that embrace magical realism, morally grey characters, and dark humour—and these books helped shape my voice as a writer.
Reading it felt like getting lost in a fever dream where colonial horror, angels, and automatons sit down for tea. I still don’t fully understand it, and I don’t want to. It rewired how I thought about fantasy’s limits.
'A benchmark not just for imaginative writing but for the human imagination in itself...Read this book, and marvel.' Alan Moore
'A work of genius.' Iain Sinclair
'Brian Catling is simply a genius. His writing is so extraordinary it hurts.' Terry Gilliam
In the tradition of China Mieville, Michael Moorcock and Alasdair Gray, B. Catling's The Vorrh is literary dark fantasy which wilfully ignores boundaries, crossing over into surrealism, magic-realism, horror and steampunk.
In B. Catling's twisting, poetic narrative, Bakelite robots lie broken - their hard shells cracked by human desire - and an inquisitive Cyclops waits for his keeper and…
I've been reading Horror and Dark Fantasy books since I was twelve and prefer this genre over any other. The depths of the human psyche explored in these genres expose the core of storytelling itself and the themes that make the best stories really come alive!
For Fantasy readers who wonder why goblins are always at war with humans.
The three books together are epic in scale and the friendship between the leader of the humans and one of the old wise ones among the goblins will be awesome for Dark Fantasy readers who recognize that goblin culture is very different from humans.
Some recognizable mythology is worked into the story and makes perfect sense, especially the purpose of changelings. Also there are dragons, especially in the second book. A strange symbiotic relationship between dragons and goblins is very original and the diversity of different types of goblins makes this Fantasy world one of a kind!
The cult Fantasy book that started it all!Discover a dark world where legends begin and natural magic reignsThey say that the earth shifts on its axis every 200,000 years...When the planet shifted, most of the surface dwellers were destroyed. The few pockets of survivors were left without technology and little supplies, but they built a simple feudal society on the rubble of the city.Meanwhile the creatures in the deep places moved closer to the surface, taking over the old underground transport tunnels abandoned by the humans. Their own Shamanic way of life had survived only by staying out of sight…
I have been writing for the past 21 years on mystical themes with a good dose of Mother Earth Love tossed in. Fifteen years ago, I launched the spoken word website, offering one ten-minute recorded essay monthly on mystical/philosophical themes. Having published three nonfiction books, I decided to take my love of nature and interest in mysticism and write a novel for young philosophers and Earth-loving elders. My book follows the mystical journey of a rather practical eleven-year-old to an enchanted lake in the high Alps. It contains gentle animals, wise trees, kindred spirits, and healing waters.
George MacDonald’s mystical adoration of nature shines through all his writings. His books take place in Nineteenth-Century Scotland and England, in an obviously much quieter age. His insights into the living chorus of the natural world transcend any I have ever read.
His characters walk everywhere and absorb the natural world as if through a loving relationship with another soul. I consider George MacDonald my teacher, as did C.S. Lewis. This was written for children, or the childlike in all of us. I read it every year and have dedicated my book, Whippoorwill Willingly to MacDonald.
Princess Irene lives in a castle in a wild and lonely mountainous region. One day she discovers a steep and winding stairway leading to a bewildering labyrinth of unused passages with closed doors - and a further stairway. What lies at the top? Can the ring the princess is given protect her against the lurking menace of the goblins from under the mountain?
My GameLit stories like The Mad Immortal are inspired by the fun I've had playing RPGs such as World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons. It’s that same sense of adventure that I seek out in other stories and that I feel these five books I selected demonstrate. In their own way, each of them inspired my own series as I worked to develop the rules for its magic system and to come up with compelling ways the characters could interact within those established restrictions. I love reading about clever applications of magic to solve problems, especially when it’s not immediately obvious how a given spell would help!
Life Reset follows a once-dominant player of the game NEO named Oren who is betrayed by his guildmates and ends up trapped as a goblin NPC within the game. This setup allows the story to focus on unique, goblin-specific abilities.
However, what I found most interesting about this book was its emphasis on an almost real-time strategy system of constructing and upgrading various buildings to manage his goblin tribe. While that wasn’t something I drew upon too heavily for my own story, I did love Oren’s frequent creative problem-solving, as well as the ways he tried to bend or even break the game’s systems to his advantage.
I personally feel that stories like this work best when the protagonist has limited options but the freedom to apply those options in a variety of surprising ways.
★ The best selling 6-books series is now complete! ★
In video games, players hunt monsters. But what happens when a veteran player finds himself on the monster's side?
Oren, a high-level guild master, wakes in the body of a lowly goblin. Cast out, betrayed by his most trusted advisors, Oren is stuck in New Era Online. However, there are advantages to being on the monsters’ side. Starting from scratch, he’ll have to build up a powerful monster clan to take revenge.But first, he'll have to survive long enough not be someone else's fodder.Life Reset is the first book in…
Growing up at a time when both Monty Python and ‘alternative comedians’ like Ben Elton were on the telly, I couldn’t help but absorb British humor, and coupling that with a love of science fiction and fantasy (Asimov, Heinlein, Moorcock, etc.), I was ripe for an introduction to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett… And the rest is history. The world is too serious a place, and I find comedy of all kinds, but especially SFF, a welcome escape. My own writing has been inspired by all the books on this list, and while I work in a range of genres, almost everything includes at least some snarky humor.
This is the most Terry Pratchett-y book I’ve come across that wasn’t written by Terry Pratchett! It’s often hilarious, but also hides a deeper commentary on war, selfishness, and human nature. This is a short, quick read, but well-told and engaging—once I started, I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
T. Kingfisher writes in a number of different styles, and this is the funniest of her books that I’ve read, just beating Swordheart.
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Nine Goblins, a novella of low fantasy and high mischief.
No one knows exactly how the Goblin War began, but folks will tell you that goblins are stinking, slinking, filthy, sheep-stealing, henhouse-raiding, obnoxious, rude, and violent. Goblins would actually agree with all this, and might throw in “cowardly” and “lazy” too for good measure.
But goblins don't go around killing people for fun, no matter what the propaganda posters say. And when a confrontation with an evil wizard lands a troop of nine goblins deep behind enemy lines,…
As a writer of children’s books, I’ve always been fascinated – not merely by the narrative, characters, and plot that form a story – but how ideas themselves spring to life and cross-pollinate to form some kind of creative endeavor, whether that’s a song, a poem, a book or anything else that provokes an emotional response. Rather than shying away from the question: "Where do you get your ideas?" I like to embrace it and search for answers myself. These books all set contexts through which the nature of imagination and ideas are explored alongside the tales they tell, and they remain an influence on the ideas I have, and the words I write.
A formative book from my childhood, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen kick-started my love of all things magic, heroic, and fantastical. Not only that, but the setting was close to where I grew up – these were locations I knew but viewed through a mythic lens. Loosely based on the legend of the Wizard of Alderley Edge, Alan Garner creates a fantasy world that feels so real as two children are pulled into an adventure where the very future of the world of men is on the line. It remains so influential on my own writing that I still return to the old dwarf caves of Fundinvale as an adult and enjoy the tale every bit as much as I did when I was a ten-year-old reading by torchlight under the duvet.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time.
"Alan Garner's fiction is something special." - Neil Gaiman
When Colin and Susan are pursued by eerie creatures across Alderley Edge, they are saved by the Wizard. He takes them into the caves of Fundindelve, where he watches over the enchanted sleep of one hundred and forty knights.
But the heart of the magic that binds them - Firefrost, also known as the Weirdstone of Brisingamen - has been lost. The Wizard has been searching for the stone for more than 100 years, but the forces…
A few years ago, I read the Sword of Truth Series. I thought that it was well-written, but the tone was so horrifically, irredeemably dark, and miserable, with such truly horrible things happening to just about everybody in them that it actually put me off reading for a while. It was books like these that brought me back, that showed me that modern literature could show the best of mankind. They reminded me that even though bad things happened, human beings were inherently good, and that they tried to do their best, that the world was a bright place, not a dark one.
The world-building in this series is simply spectacular. You can tell by reading just how much effort Mr. Mancour put into understanding how a medieval world works and how magic might have fit into it. Castles, cavalry, swordsmen, wizards, goblins, building a town, sieges, all of this and more is here. There is nothing else quite like it. It’s Game of Thrones for people tired of all the misery and your favorite characters snuffing it every fifteen pages.
Minalan gave up a promising career as a professional warmage to live the quiet life of a village spellmonger in the remote mountain valley of Boval. It was a peaceful, beautiful little fief, far from the dangerous feudal petty squabbles of the Five Duchies, on the world of Callidore. There were cows. Lots of cows. And cheese.
For six months things went well: he found a quaint little shop, befriended the local lord, the village folk loved him, he found a sharp young apprentice to help out, and best yet, he met a comely young widow with the prettiest eyes…
