Recommendations
Books Like The Burning
A young man with no special power decides to become the greatest swordsman alive — and trains until it's true
Evan Winter's The Rage of Dragons is the first book in The Burning duology — an African-inspired epic fantasy that follows Tau Solarin, a young man of the Lower Caste in the Omehi, a people constantly at war with the Hedeni on the continent they invaded. After a massacre that kills everyone he loves, Tau cannot access the magic that protects his people's fighters. He has one advantage: he is willing to train past human endurance, and past human sanity. The world-building draws on Xhosa culture and Zulu history, and the combat is more detailed and more brutal than almost any fantasy novel published in the last decade. If the intensity, the protagonist whose only tool is will, and the world-building rooted in African history gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Children of Blood and Bone
by Tomi Adeyemi
A West African-inspired fantasy world where a dispossessed magical people fights to reclaim their power — Adeyemi's world-building draws on Yoruba mythology in the same way that Winter's draws on Xhosa and Zulu history, and both center protagonists from oppressed castes discovering their power.
- 2Buy
The Blade Itself
by Joe Abercrombie
Grimdark fantasy at its most fully realized — three protagonists, none of them heroes in any conventional sense, pulled into a war orchestrated by forces that consider them expendable. Abercrombie's military detail and his systematic dismantling of heroic fantasy are the closest Western parallel to what Winter achieves in The Rage of Dragons.
- 3Buy
Red Rising
by Pierce Brown
A young man from the lowest caste of a rigidly stratified society embeds himself in the elite institution that maintains that hierarchy — the same basic structure as Tau in the UrumQa training with the highborn fighters, and the same relentless pace that turns what should be impossible into inevitable.
- 4Buy
The Way of Kings
by Brandon Sanderson
Epic fantasy at planetary scale — a slave-turned-soldier, a scholar in a world that forbids women from reading, and a prince who knows his kingdom is about to collapse. Sanderson's Stormlight Archive has the same investment in military hierarchy, the same detailed magic system, and the same commitment to characters who earn their competence.
- 5Buy
An Ember in the Ashes
by Sabaa Tahir
A Roman-inspired world where a soldier trains in an empire whose brutality is its fundamental character — Tahir's soldiers and Tau's warriors both inhabit training institutions where the normal rules are designed to grind down everyone the institution doesn't actually need.
- 6Buy
Six of Crows
by Leigh Bardugo
A heist built from characters who have no safety net, pulling off something impossible through preparation and willingness to sacrifice — Kaz Brekker and Tau Solarin are very different people, but both are people who refuse to accept that they cannot have the thing they are determined to have.
- 7Buy
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
Kvothe narrates his own legend at the end of it, in an inn, with most of the world's knowledge stripped away — the story of how he went from homeless child to the most feared name in the world is built, like Tau's, on the question of what it takes for someone with no advantages to become extraordinary.
- 8Buy
Mistborn: The Final Empire
by Brandon Sanderson
A magical underclass in a world ruled by an immortal god-king, attempting a revolution everyone says is impossible — Sanderson's magic system is one of the most inventive in fantasy, and the sense of a society built to maintain oppression and a protagonist who refuses to accept it is common ground with The Rage of Dragons.
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