More like Shadow Cry
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- A Red Sun Also Rises
Mark Hodderstandalone novel2012
similar bymysterioussecondary worldscience fiction+1 more
"Reclusive Anglican priest Aiden Fleisher and brilliant hunchback Clarissa Stark travel as missionaries to the distant South Pacific island of Koluwai, where they encounter hostile natives--and a gateway to another world lit by two suns. Fleisher and Stark meet the native Yatsill, consummate mimics who construct an elaborate society based on Victorian London, using details mined from the thoughts of their new visitors. As Aiden and Clarissa strive to make sense of this strange new world, they become aware of an approaching menace: the arrival of a third sun that will bring the Blood Gods to ravage the world."--Library Journal.
- His Dark Materials Universe
universe13 books1995
Start hereHis Dark Materials · Start here
similar by+1 more
In a world like ours and unlike it, every human soul walks outside the body in the shape of an animal — a daemon, who speaks, who cannot be lied to, and who settles into one fixed form only when childhood ends. This is the country of His Dark Materials: a company of parallel worlds across which an invisible dust of consciousness drifts down upon the waking mind; where a Church that calls itself the Magisterium would sooner sever a child's soul than let that Dust be understood; and where a golden instrument, the alethiometer, answers true questions for anyone with the patience to read it. Philip Pullman's design stands in two trilogies and a scatter of shorter tales. His Dark Materials — Northern Lights (published in America as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass — carries Lyra Belacqua from the rooftops of a shadow Oxford across the borders between worlds. The Book of Dust returns to that same territory: La Belle Sauvage looks back to Lyra as an infant carried through a great flood, while The Secret Commonwealth follows her grown and less certain into adulthood, with a concluding volume closing the arc. Around them sit slim companion books — Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine — and Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation, made with Pullman's blessing. The register is grave and luminous at once, its title lifted from Milton and its quarrel drawn from Blake: a story that takes the side of curiosity, love, and the physical world against any authority that would forbid them. It reads as adventure — armoured bears, aeronauts, knife-cut windows between skies — yet reasons like philosophy. Begin with Northern Lights / The Golden Compass and read the first trilogy through before turning to The Book of Dust, which deepens everything the first has already made you feel.
- Inverted World
Christopher Prieststandalone novel1974
similar bymysterioussecondary worldscience fiction
A city travels slowly along tracks laid by the residents ahead of the city and pulled up from behind the city, through territory where other people live.
- Estcarp
series8 books1963
completed
part of Witch World
similar bysecondary world
Estcarp is the founding cycle of Andre Norton's Witch World series, beginning with Witch World (1963) and continuing through books such as Web of the Witch World, Three Against the Witch World, and Sorceress of the Witch World. It is set on a world where magic long ago displaced science and, for centuries, was wielded almost exclusively by women, following outsiders and native witches who defend the ancient realm of Estcarp against rival powers from beyond its borders. Norton wrote most of the cycle alone before bringing in collaborators later in her career, as part of the wider Witch World universe.
- Magic by the Numbers
series10 books1980
similar bysecondary world
Master of the Five Magics follows Alodar, a young man from a fallen noble house trying to win the hand of a queen by proving himself in a hard-magic system built from five distinct, strictly rule-bound disciplines — thaumaturgy, alchemy, magic, sorcery, and wizardry — each with its own price and its own limits. Lyndon Hardy's original trilogy, continuing through Secret of the Sixth Magic and Riddle of the Seven Realms, has Alodar master each discipline in turn, before a later book, decades on, adds a fourth-generation story (The Archimage's Fourth Daughter) to the same magic-numbers conceit.
- Night's Daughter
Marion Zimmer Bradleystandalone novel1985
similar bysecondary world+2 more
Since time immemorial, when the Serpent-lord coupled in the Great Rite with the Priestess of the Night, the Kingdoms of Light and Dark, of Sun and of Moon have been at war. Now Pamina, daughter of the Starqueen, supreme symbol of the Night, and of Sarastro, King of the Royal House of the Sun, has to choose which of her parents she will follow, in custom and in principle. And together with her lover, the princely Tamino, she must face her Ordeal at the Court of Wisdom, Ordeals of Earth and Air, of Fire and Water, from which none can flinch and none can escape.
- The Old Kingdom / Abhorsen milieu
series11 books1995
similar bysecondary world
The Old Kingdom, or Abhorsen in North America and the UK, is a fantasy series written by Australian author Garth Nix. It originated in 1995 with the novel Sabriel and has continued in the novels Lirael (2001), Abhorsen (2003), Goldenhand (2016), and Terciel & Elinor (2021), as well as a prequel novel titled Clariel (2014). The Old Kingdom also consists of the novella The Creature in the Case (2005) and various other short fiction.
- New Crobuzon
series4 books2000
similar bysecondary world+2 more
The New Crobuzon books are three standalone novels by China Miéville set in and around New Crobuzon, a vast, corrupt industrial city in his invented world of Bas-Lag where magic, biopunk technology, and several sentient species coexist. Perdido Street Station follows a renegade scientist and his lover after an experiment unleashes something monstrous on the city, while The Scar and Iron Council return to the same setting with different casts and only loose continuity between books.
- The Quest of the Riddle-Master
series3 books1976
completed
similar bysecondary world+1 more
Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy follows Morgon, prince of the small island of Hed, whose discovery of three star-shaped birthmarks on his forehead draws him into a search for his own hidden identity and a confrontation with ancient, shape-shifting powers. Drawing on Celtic myth, the three books are prized for their lyrical prose and riddle-based magic, and are often cited among the best high fantasy of the 1970s.
- Lud-in-the-Mist
Hope Mirrleesstandalone novel1926
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Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is the third and final novel by the British writer Hope Mirrlees. It continues the author's exploration of the themes of Life and Art, by a method already described in the preface of her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919): "to turn from time to time upon the action the fantastic limelight of eternity, with a sudden effect of unreality and the hint of a world within a world".
- The Black Magician Trilogy
series3 books2001
part of Kyralia series
similar bysecondary world
Trudi Canavan's Black Magician Trilogy (The Magicians' Guild, The Novice, The High Lord, 2001-2003) opens in the city of Imardin, where the ruling magicians' guild's annual purge of the slums goes wrong when a street girl named Sonea unknowingly shatters their protective shield with raw, untrained power. The guild must hunt her down and decide whether to control her or train her, and the trilogy follows Sonea's forced initiation into magical society and the guild's internal politics. It's Canavan's best-known trilogy and the founding story of her Kyralia setting.
- High Hallack
series11 books1965
completed
part of Witch World
similar bysecondary world
Andre Norton's High Hallack cycle is set within her larger Witch World, a parallel planet where ancient magic supplanted technology and was long practiced only by women. The High Hallack novels follow various protagonists -- outcasts, shape-changers, refugees -- navigating the region's witches, invaders and old magic, mostly independent of each other beyond the shared setting. A. C. Crispin later collaborated with Norton on further entries in the cycle.
- The Kingkiller Chronicle
series8 books2002
similar bysecondary world
The Kingkiller Chronicle is a planned fantasy trilogy by the American writer Patrick Rothfuss. The first two books, The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, were released in 2007 and 2011. The books released in the series have sold over 10 million copies.
- Cosmere
universe54 books2005
Start hereThe Final Empire · Start here
similar bysecondary world
Before the worlds, there was Adonalsium, and then there was not. A god shattered into sixteen Shards of raw creative power, and those who seized them carried their fragments across the void to seed new planets, new peoples, new ways of working the impossible. The Cosmere is the one universe those Shards made: a scattering of worlds that seem, at first, to share nothing but a sky, until you notice the same law running quietly beneath each of them, and the same silent traveler passing through their margins. Every world keeps its own book and its own magic. On Scadrial, the Mistborn cycle burns metals into power: a self-contained trilogy of thieves and tyranny, followed by a second era that drags the same world into gunslinging early industry. On storm-battered Roshar, The Stormlight Archive raises its vast, ongoing epic around knights, spren, and oaths spoken aloud. Elsewhere stand the shorter keystones: Elantris, a city of fallen gods; Warbreaker, a tale of returned dead and living color; White Sand, told in graphic-novel form under the twin suns of Taldain. Threaded between them run the novellas, from Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter to The Sunlit Man and the pieces gathered in Arcanum Unbounded, where the hidden connections surface most plainly. All of it is the design of one hand, Brandon Sanderson, working a single pattern across two decades. What sets this universe apart is its faith in rules: magic here is a system, lawful and learnable, so discovery feels less like wonder handed down than like physics worked out. The cross-connections reward the patient reader, a symbol here, a name there, one immortal wanderer everywhere, but no book demands you have read another first. Newcomers do best entering through Mistborn: The Final Empire, the most self-contained doorway, or the standalone Elantris or Warbreaker; readers who prefer their epics vast can begin with The Way of Kings. The deeper links, and the novellas that expose them, wait for whenever you are ready to look.
- Queen's Thief
series41 books1996
similar bysecondary world+1 more
Queen's Thief begins with The Thief, in which a boastful, underestimated young thief is pulled from prison to steal a legendary stone for the king's scholar, only for the story to reveal by its end that its narrator has been playing a much longer game than the reader realized. Megan Whalen Turner's series expands from that single heist into court intrigue and small-scale warfare among a set of Mediterranean-flavored kingdoms, with later books often shifting whose perspective the reader trusts. It's known for close, deliberately withheld narration as much as its plotting.
- Seven Kingdoms / Graceling Realm
series6 books2008
similar bysecondary world
Graceling introduces the Seven Kingdoms, where some people are born with a Grace, an extreme and often dangerous specialized talent, and follows Katsa, whose Grace for killing has made her a weapon for a manipulative king, as she learns to use it on her own terms instead. Kristin Cashore continued the world with the prequel-adjacent Fire, set in a neighboring land, and the sequel Bitterblue, then extended it further north with Winterkeep and Seasparrow. Each later book largely follows a new protagonist rather than continuing straight through Katsa's story.
- Pathfinder Trilogy
series3 books2010
similar bysecondary worldscience fiction+1 more
The Pathfinder series is a completed series of novels by Orson Scott Card that is notable for its unusual fusion of the themes of science fiction and fantasy, with some elements of historical fiction. One significant aspect of the Pathfinder series is its uniquely complex but well documented set of time travel rules.
- Millennium's Rule
series4 books2014
similar bysecondary world
Millennium's Rule is set across multiple worlds that only certain travelers can cross between, opening with Tyen, an archaeology student who unearths a sentient, centuries-old book named Vella, and Rielle, a dyer's daughter hiding forbidden magical talent in a society ruled by priests who forbid it. Trudi Canavan follows both of them as their discoveries chip away at what their worlds have taught them about magic, history, and who holds power. The series runs Thief's Magic, Angel of Storms, and Successor's Promise.
- Shadowmarch
series5 books2001
similar bysecondary world
Twins Barrick and Briony Eddon are next in line to rule Southmarch when their father the king is taken captive in war, leaving them to hold a fracturing kingdom together against scheming nobles and a slowly advancing invasion by the Qar, an ancient and inhuman people from beyond the mysterious Shadowline. Tad Williams's Shadowmarch series follows the twins as they're pulled toward secrets buried beneath their own castle, including gods older than the kingdom itself. The story runs across Shadowmarch, Shadowplay, Shadowrise, and Shadowheart.
