100 Books Like Warrior Scarlet

Even though it’s more of a YA book, I struggled with this as a teenager, so I picked it back up a few years ago with no great expectations. We were staying in a static home in Cornwall and the weather was vile, morning and night. Perhaps I would have motored through any book given these circumstances. Or perhaps it’s just a magical novel.

I’m going with the latter because it has since become my number-one comfort read. Comradeship, adventure, tension and drama, authentic historical detail, lyrical descriptions of Iron Age Britain… it has it all and more. As it happens, I have only just finished the sequel – The Silver Branch – and this book is a worthy challenger, too!

This is my all-time favourite novel by Rosemary Sutcliff—an author whose works inspired me to become a writer of historical fiction, and, long in the future, encouraged me to craft my own Tudor young adult novel.

Set in early Britain, it tells the story of Aquila, a young man of British birth. A Viking raiding party destroys Aquila’s home and family. After he is left to die by the original raiders, a leader of another Viking group takes Aquila across the sea to his home as a slave. For years, bitterness and hopelessness also enslave Aquila.

The Lantern Bearers is such a beautiful, richly layered story of healing, redemption, and the victory of the human spirit. It even introduces the reader to the young Arthur Pendragon as he steps towards his destiny. Believe me, I still read this book when the world seems dark, and I need reminding of hope.

This novel reminds the reader that humans have carried certain truths from the dawn of time. It tells the story of Phaedrus, a slave from birth. When he gains his wooden-foil of freedom in the gladiatorial arena, he finds his life suddenly empty, and without purpose. This results in him agreeing to assume another’s identity. Not simply ‘another’s identity’ but to become a ‘king’ of the Dal Riada people of Scotland. Phaedrus, to his surprise, discovers leadership gives his life true purpose, friendship, and love. But the time comes when he must show himself worthy of the Mark of the Horse Lord. Beautifully told, the novel speaks of how sacredness and self-sacrifice intertwine for those who truly rule. 

Sutcliff’s characters and stories are always believable—and show her amazing gift to always make her research invisible to the reader. All her works feed from actual history. She weaves a fragment or story from the past into a rich tapestry of the human experience and makes history live again. This tale shows her skills perfectly. Sutcliff uses as her source Y Gododdin, a period poem, to frame the construction of this coming-of-age story. Sutcliff takes the torch of the poem’s attempt to keep alive the memory of men who fought and died in a sixth-century British battle, comparable to that of the Battle of Thermopylae, to relight it through the eyes of Prosper, Sutcliff imagined British shield bearer. A witness to and one of the few to survive this unwinnable battle, Prosper sings a tale of The Shining Company who sacrificed their lives so others could live.

Going even further back in time this book looks to the archaeological evidence and asks, what was life like in the very distant past, in deep prehistory?

Was it short, violent, and miserable as we are often led to believe, or is there a different story? Here Francis Pryor examines the evidence to test this question and finds that actually, much like today, life was complex and yet a place where home and hearth lay at the center of our ancestors’ lives.

Francis Pryor writes from the heart, with empathy and imagination. I found it an easy read given it deals with what can be very dry pieces of archaeological evidence. If you are interested in early prehistory, this is a must read.

Why was Stonehenge built? What was its function? Cornwell offers a new interpretation that is both eminently possible and completely believable. Transporting us back to a time long forgotten, he makes us believe. And that is no easy task! When I first gazed in person upon Stonehenge, my thoughts, like those of almost everyone else, were consumed with “Why” and “How.” But this book takes us further into the mystery by asking “Who?” What motivated the first builders, and those who followed after them for thousands of years? They were “just folks,” like us. But they must have been motivated by something that we, sad to say, are lacking.    

It is a commonplace observation about the history of archaeology that the Three Age System, along with the discovery of high human antiquity, forms one of the two great defining ‘events’ of prehistoric archaeology in the nineteenth century.

Generations of students have been introduced to the discipline (and the nature of its distinctive contribution to the writing of human history) through re-telling of foundation stories about antiquity, and our capacity to order and measure it.

Rowley-Conwy’s excellent book significantly recasts the first of these great foundation narratives and teaches us much about the continuing importance of those narratives.

The Sunbird was Wilber Smith’s first book. It was one of the first books on Wild African Adventure that I read and has kindled in me a lifelong passion for Africa, African animals, and the love of wildlife. It was a reason that I became a veterinarian and that I wanted to work with African Wildlife. It is a mix of contemporary and historic African Fiction. It is memorable because it is a wonderful story that I would want to share around the fire in a camp somewhere in the heart of the African bush. I would want Wilbur Smith to tell me the story as we sit around the fire. It evokes all that is magical and wonderful about Africa, the continent I love and live on. The book taught me that the story is paramount. Not the skill of the author as a literary giant. I want to… show more.

Who wouldn’t want to know where we came from and how we got here? The new science of ancient DNA has upended so many notions about our past that we had held dear. 

I loved how Reich—a leader in this field—explained this new science so accessibly and with great stories to boot. Everything I knew about human history was wrong!

This important volume traces a picture of European prehistory, from the earliest agricultural communities of the Neolithic period to the Roman world. Stuart Piggott, who was a great English scholar of the twentieth century, guides us here to understand the ancient roots of facts and situations that have gradually evolved up to the history we know well.