Recommendations
Books Like Daevabad
A con artist in 18th-century Cairo accidentally summons a djinn warrior — and gets swept to a hidden city that wants to destroy her
S.A. Chakraborty's The City of Brass opens in 1817 Cairo, where Nahri makes her living as a con artist performing fake exorcisms and selling false cures. When a real ceremony goes wrong and she accidentally summons Dara — a powerful djinn warrior bound to her family — she is pulled from Cairo to the legendary city of Daevabad, where six djinn tribes have been fighting for centuries and her arrival is not welcome. If the Arabian-mythology world-building, the political court intrigue, the morally complex romance, and the exploration of diaspora and identity gripped you, these eight picks go to the same depth.
- 1Buy
The Poppy War
by R.F. Kuang
A fantasy drawing on Chinese history rather than Islamic mythology, but with the same intellectual density, the same political machinery, and the same willingness to take the violence of history seriously rather than sanitizing it. Kuang and Chakraborty are direct peers in literary-quality epic fantasy.
- 2Buy
Children of Blood and Bone
by Tomi Adeyemi
A West African-inspired fantasy where magic has been outlawed and a girl from a family of mages tries to restore it before the king erases her people entirely. Same richly non-European mythology, same political urgency, same moral complexity.
- 3Buy
A Memory Called Empire
by Arkady Martine
A diplomat from a small space station arrives at the imperial capital and must navigate a court that wants her assimilated — Martine's space opera uses the same tools as Chakraborty's fantasy: a peripheral protagonist inside an imperial center, diaspora identity under pressure, and political intrigue as emotional drama.
- 4Buy
An Ember in the Ashes
by Sabaa Tahir
A Roman Empire-inspired world where conquered people fight to survive under brutal occupation — similar class and ethnic dynamics to Daevabad, with the same slow-burn forbidden romance and the same question of what violence a person is willing to commit for freedom.
- 5Buy
The Bear and the Nightingale
by Katherine Arden
A girl who can see the Slavic spirits her village's Christianity is trying to destroy — same mythological depth, same conflict between old ways and new power, same atmospheric prose. Arden draws from Russian folklore with the same fidelity Chakraborty draws from Islamic tradition.
- 6Buy
Daughter of the Moon Goddess
by Sue Lynn Tan
A girl raised on the moon by her exiled mother embarks on a quest through Chinese mythology to free her — lyrical, emotionally complex, and deeply rooted in the mythology it draws from. A natural companion to City of Brass for readers who want non-Western mythological fantasy.
- 7Buy
Six of Crows
by Leigh Bardugo
A heist crew in a richly detailed secondary world, each character carrying the weight of their culture and their choices — the ensemble cast, the political complexity, and the moral greyness match Chakraborty's trilogy. Bardugo's world-building is among the best in contemporary fantasy.
- 8Buy
The Priory of the Orange Tree
by Samantha Shannon
An 850-page standalone epic fantasy with three civilizations, four narrators, and dragons as political and religious symbols. Shannon builds her world with the same care Chakraborty does — both reward readers who want fantasy that feels historically grounded.
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