Books like The Cross-Time Engineer — picked by fans

This was one of the first books to open my mind to the possibility of a country that would put social responsibility and ecological sustainability at the forefront of its goals.

Ernest Callenbach’s story is told through the journalist reports and personal writings of William Weston, who visits Ecotopia to report on this unique country, originally the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.

I love how Weston’s skepticism turns toward understanding. He eventually embraces what Ecotopia stands for and decides to live there himself to be a conduit of connection to the world outside of Ecotopia.

I was so moved by how a fictional story could so illuminate our own fears, our own hopes, and the possibilities of our future, that my own writing turned toward eco-fantasy after reading this book. 

What moved me is how much it means to belong to the Acoma estate.

Nacoya with her sharp wisdom, Keyoke with his unyielding honor, Arakasi with his chosen allegiance, even the grey warriors—they all belong to something bigger than themselves. When danger hits, the fear ripples through everyone. When triumph comes, it lifts all of them.

A big draw of the book was seeing people pull together not because they’re supposed to, but because they genuinely care. The Acoma isn’t just a political house; it feels like a place where being needed gives everyone a kind of quiet dignity. 

I felt awe-struck stepping into Gaea’s hollow world—where zeppelin-sized blimps glide through a sky inside the giant, planet-like being, and forests and rivers hang overhead. Gaea feels both grand and intimate: cathedral-scale biology paired with tavern-table camaraderie. 

And then there are the titanides. Their society feels hand-tooled—full of music and unpretentious sensuality. No posturing, no greed, just beings who live in balance. The centaur-like titanides dwell beneath a colossal tree hung with lanterns… and it all feels alien and warm and cozy and wonderful. 

Mammoths grazing outside the protagonist’s dwelling—yeah, that was love at first sight.

And the lived-in environment? Homes carved into colossal, cultivated trees, and people served by public, stackable electric vehicles—yes, please. The land thrives, and no species has been driven to oblivion.   

Sawyer’s parallel-Earth Neanderthals truly appealed to me: the emotional restraint, the honesty, the structural elegance of their culture. Even their norms around maintaining a sustainable population are handled with startling clarity—seasonal, communal parenting. 

No prisons, no poverty, no religion weaponized into hierarchy. Life runs on calm confidence, as if evolution took a gentler branch, and society—as it’d scaled up—managed to keep its soul. 

The history of the Baltic Crusade cannot be understood in isolation from the Polish kingdom. This is the era when Poland recovers from the disasters begun by the Mongol invasions of the 1240s and begins its own eastward expansion.

As the title indicates, this is really the story of Casimir III, whose father arranged a Lithuanian marriage that brought peace on the eastern frontiers and later allowed him to expand toward Rus’ (especially Ukraine) when the minor states there collapsed. Casimir succeeded in everything except siring a legitimate male heir, even though that was the one task expected of every monarch in this era. He did leave behind a flourishing state, a powerful church, and a national goal of driving back those Germans (especially the Teutonic Knights) who had made great inroads into areas claimed as the national patrimony.

This is a provocative book. Its very title suggests how difficult it is to understand Polish history than other that a divine joke. Yet his scholarship is excellent and his insights enlightening.

This is especially true for the first volume, which deals with the emergence of the Polish kingdom from rude barbarism to a political and cultural force so powerful that, after its union with Lithuania, dominated East Central Europe for generations. The total collapse of the kingdom in the 18th century—largely to defects in the constitution that allowed foreign interference in the election of the king—has blinded us to what Poland achieved in those forgotten centuries.

I am a travel writer as well as a children’s author and the Polish city of Kraków (or Cracow) is one of my favourite destinations in Europe, and one I have written about too.

Its ancient buildings mean that it’s a place where the medieval era comes alive, and that’s why I loved this book, which is written by an American professor of English who had a life-long love of Poland and its people.

Set in 1461 it tells the story of a boy named Joseph Charnetski who is thrillingly caught up in plots and intrigue (featuring alchemists and hypnotists along the way) when his family seeks sanctuary in the city.

Rynecki’s great-grandfather, Moshe, was a painter who documented moments of Jewish life in the interwar years: women sewing, children playing, wedding celebrations, men in prayer. When WWII broke out Moshe’s paintings were hidden, and afterward only a fraction were recovered. In this book, Rynecki recounted her decades-long quest to locate and archive the lost artwork. It’s a memoir about the lengths one will go to to ensure a lost family legacy will never be forgotten.

The book refutes one of the abiding misconceptions about the Second World War—that the Jews of Europe went passively to their deaths.

In fact, there was fierce and sustained armed resistance operating from many of the ghettos, culminating in uprisings, as well as revolts in concentration and forced labour camps, and a significant, if sometimes covert, Jewish presence in partisan armies. Furthermore, much of this resistance was enabled, organised, and led by women.

This is well-researched, multifaceted history, raising fascinating questions about the nature of agency, resistance, and testimony, as well as being an intense and atmospheric tribute to these women.

Remembering the heroes, Witold Pilecki got himself arrested. After two and half years as a prisoner in Auschwitz, he escaped. He witnessed the brutality, the mass gassing of Europe’s Jews, thousands each day. He was among the first to set off the alarms that Auschwitz was the epicenter of the Nazis' plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews.