A weekend trip through Cumbria tracing my wife’s Wharton family ancestry, from Lammerside Castle and Wharton Hall to rebellion, exile and a lost fortune.
This past weekend, my wife and I went on a bit of an adventure into her family history.
She’s been researching her ancestry recently and uncovered the story of the Wharton family in Cumbria. It turns out she has aristocratic lineage, although that particular chapter of the family history came to a fairly dramatic end.
One of her ancestors found himself on the wrong side of the Jacobite rising and eventually ended up living in Spain, with the family lands seized by the Crown. By all accounts, he was also a gambler with a taste for extravagant living, which probably didn’t help matters.
So, in the space of a generation, an aristocratic family went from landowners to tenants of the Lowthers, with the estate and fortune largely gone.
You really couldn’t make it up.
We decided to visit some of the places connected with the family, starting with Wharton Hall, where later generations lived. The hall is still standing, although it’s on private land, so we could only see it from a distance.
Before Wharton Hall, though, the family had a castle.
Or, at least, what remains of one.
We visited the ruins of Lammerside Castle, where part of the central keep is still standing in the Cumbrian landscape. These days, its primary line of defence appears to be a field full of rather standoffish cows.
We wandered around the ruins, had our lunch there and took in the surrounding valley and the view towards Hunger Fell.
It was beautiful, but there was something quite sad about it too. You’re standing beside the remains of a home that once represented wealth, power and permanence, knowing that within a few generations nearly all of it had disappeared.It was beautiful, but there was something quite sad about it too. You’re standing beside the remains of a home that once represented wealth, power and permanence, knowing that within a few generations nearly all of it had disappeared.
Naturally, as a fantasy writer, my brain immediately started filing things away for future use.
There’s probably a novel hiding in there somewhere.
While we were in the area, we also visited nearby Pendragon Castle, another atmospheric ruin with an appropriately legendary name. We crawled through a low tunnel to explore the ruins, only to notice when we were on our way out that the ruins were closed to the public. Oops.
It was a fascinating weekend and a reminder that sometimes the best story fuel is sitting quietly in the landscape, waiting for you to notice it.
Looking for fantasy novels where information is the battlefield? Discover five fantasy books about secrets, espionage, bureaucracy, political intrigue, and the struggle to control the truth.
Armies clash. Heroes fight villains. Kingdoms rise and fall.
But some of the most interesting fantasy novels I’ve read are about information.
Who controls it.
Who hides it.
Who gets to decide what’s true.
In these books, the decisive battles aren’t fought with swords. They’re fought with records, secrets, bureaucracy, manipulation, and the ability to shape what people believe.
If that sounds like your sort of thing, here are five books worth checking out.
This is probably the clearest example of what I’m talking about.
Baru comes from a conquered people and decides she’s going to destroy the empire that took her homeland.
The twist is that she doesn’t do it with an army.
She does it through administration. Tax policy. Economics. Bureaucracy.
It’s a novel where financial systems are weapons and accounting can be more dangerous than a sword.
What makes the book so compelling is the cost. To use the empire’s tools, Baru has to understand them. To understand them, she has to become part of them.
The result is one of the most devastating political fantasies I’ve ever read.
You could put several K. J. Parker novels on this list, but this is probably the easiest place to start.
The protagonist isn’t a great warrior or a chosen hero. He’s an engineer.
When a city comes under threat, he survives through logistics, planning, deception, and sheer nerve.
The joy of the novel is watching an intelligent person solve impossible problems.
The horror is realising how easily practical solutions can become moral compromises.
Parker understands better than almost anyone that institutions often run on paperwork, procedure, and people convincing themselves they’re being reasonable.
Abraham is interested in leverage rather than spectacle. Most of the important moments involve negotiations, agreements, obligations, and people understanding things their opponents don’t.
Very little is settled by violence.
Almost everything is settled by information.
What I love about Abraham’s work is that he never loses sight of the human cost. These aren’t abstract political manoeuvres. They’re choices that affect real people.
If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to know what you thought of them.
And if you’ve got recommendations for fantasy novels where information, bureaucracy, espionage, or institutional power sit at the heart of the story, let me know. I’m always looking for more.
A week of adventure in the Lake District with Galloway’s, including sailing, canoeing, fell walking, Rydal Cave and plenty of new experiences.
I didn’t do any writing last week.
And, for once, I’m very happy about that.
I spent the week in the Lake District on an adventure week with Galloway’s, a charity supporting blind and visually impaired people.
We were based around Coniston, and the week was packed with activities. It was a chance to get outdoors, try some new things, meet other visually impaired people, and learn how they approach activities that I’d either never tried before or hadn’t thought much about doing without sight.
One of the first adventures was canoeing out on the lake.
We used a tethered raft made from two three-person canoes tied together, which gave us a stable platform for getting out onto the water. The lake itself was surprisingly warm, certainly warmer than I’d expected.
Being in the Lake District in good weather is always impressive, but spending so much of the week outside, moving through the landscape rather than simply visiting somewhere, gave me a very different experience of it.
The highlight, though, was sailing.
We went out on a Dart catamaran in some very windy conditions.
And it was brilliant.
At one point, we apparently hit around 32 knots. I can’t verify that personally because I was rather occupied with hanging on, but it certainly felt fast.
Really fast.
The combination of the wind, the movement of the boat and the water rushing past was exhilarating. Of everything we did during the week, sailing was the thing that immediately made me think: I need to do more of this.
So I’m now going to have a look at what sailing opportunities there are closer to home.
One of the best parts of the week wasn’t any particular activity, though. It was getting to know the other people there.
It was interesting hearing about how other blind and visually impaired people do things, what activities they’re involved with, and the opportunities that are out there if you know where to look.
I came away with quite a few ideas for things I’d like to try.
And, inevitably, plenty of story fuel.
There’s something useful about getting away from the desk and having completely different experiences. The physical sensations of being on a catamaran in high winds, scrambling up a fell, entering a cave or paddling across a lake are the sort of details that eventually find their way into stories, even when you’re not consciously looking for them.
So, no words written last week.
But after a fantastic week in the Lakes, I think the break was probably worth far more than another few chapters.
This week I prepare RAF Dragon Corps Book 3 for my editor, begin drafting The Hammer and the Crown, share my thoughts on Soulsmith and decide to take a much-needed break.
This week I’ve been getting RAF Dragon Corps Book 3 ready to send to my editor.
After finishing the draft, I’ve been working through the manuscript one last time, checking that everything is in place before handing it over.
I’ve also started drafting The Hammer and the Crown, the fourth book in my Ravenglass Legends series. It feels good to be back with Ragnar and Maja and moving forward with the next stage of the story.
On the reading front, I’m halfway through Soulsmith by Will Wight. I really enjoyed Unsouled, but I’ve found parts of the second book harder to follow. I’m going to keep reading for now, as so many readers love the Cradle series, and I’m hoping the story finds its footing again.
I also talk about feeling increasingly tired. I haven’t had a proper break since our trip to Rome in May, so I’ve decided to take next week off and give myself some time to recharge.
What if your honesty, diligence, and loyalty made you part of the problem? A look at institutions, complicity, and the central question behind the fantasy spy thriller Silent Watcher.
One of the questions that sits underneath Silent Watcher is surprisingly simple: What if you’re part of the problem?
Not the villain. Not the mastermind. Not the person giving the orders. Just someone doing their job.
It’s an uncomfortable question because most of us naturally imagine we’d be the exception.
When we read about corruption, institutional failures, or historical injustices, we picture ourselves as the person who would have spotted it. The whistleblower. The dissenter. The person who refused to go along with it.
Very few people imagine themselves as the person quietly helping the system function.
Yet that’s where most people live.
Not because they’re bad people.
Because most institutions are built from ordinary people doing work they believe matters.
The uncomfortable truth is that systems rarely depend on villains.
They depend on competent people. People who show up every day and do their jobs well.
Most of the time, those people don’t see the whole picture.
The person filling in the form doesn’t know where the form goes next.
The person writing the report doesn’t know how it will be used.
The person recording an event doesn’t know who benefits from the record.
Everyone sees a small part of the machine.
That’s what makes these systems so effective.
The people inside them don’t need to be wicked.
They just need to keep doing their jobs.
What interested me most wasn’t the discovery of corruption.
It was what comes afterwards.
Imagine discovering that you helped something harmful happen.
Now imagine discovering that your best qualities were the reason.
Your strengths. Your honesty. Your diligence.
The institution didn’t need to exploit your flaws.
It relied on your virtues.
That’s a much harder thing to live with.
It’s one thing to discover you made a mistake. It’s another to discover that the qualities you’re proudest of were exactly what made you useful.
When I started writing Silent Watcher, I knew the protagonist couldn’t be cynical.
She had to believe.
Anselma has spent twenty years serving an organisation she genuinely respects. She believes in its mission. She believes in its values. She believes she’s helping preserve the truth.
She’s good at her job.
She’s proud of her work.
She’s convinced she’s one of the good people.
That’s what makes the story work.
A cynic expects corruption. A believer doesn’t.
When a cynic discovers a lie, they shrug.
When a believer discovers a lie, the discovery threatens their entire sense of self.
Because suddenly the question isn’t whether the institution can be trusted.
It’s whether they can trust themselves.
I won’t spoil where Anselma’s story goes. But I will say this was the question I kept returning to while writing the book:
If you were diligent, decent, honest, and loyal, would you have seen what was happening?
Or would those very qualities have made you useful to the system?
I’d like to think I’d have noticed.
I’d like to think I’d have asked the difficult questions.
Most of us would.
But that’s exactly why I find the question interesting.
I’m not sure any of us really know the answer.
And I suspect admitting that uncertainty is probably the most honest place to start.
Silent Watcher is a standalone fantasy spy thriller about a woman who serves the truth inside an institution that has learned to manufacture it.
For readers of Seth Dickinson, John le Carré, and K. J. Parker.
Looking for the best revenge fantasy books? These eight dark fantasy tales begin with loss, betrayal or murder, then grow into something far bigger.
The best revenge fantasy books begin with one wound.
A murdered parent. A burned home. A betrayal by someone who should have been trusted. The protagonist sets out after one person, one name, one debt to settle.
For a while, that seems to be the whole story.
Then the trail opens up. The killer was hired. The person who paid them answers to somebody higher. A private act of revenge becomes a conspiracy, a war, or a fight for control of an entire kingdom.
That is what I love about revenge fantasy.
Revenge gets a character moving. It gives them a purpose when grief has taken everything else away. But it rarely stays simple. The deeper they go, the more they learn that the world is bigger, darker and more complicated than the loss that first set them on the road.
The old template is The Count of Monte Cristo. Edmond Dantès begins as an innocent man destroyed by betrayal, but the real story is not whether he gets revenge. It is what revenge turns him into.
Fantasy has been using that formula ever since.
Here are eight revenge fantasy books that start with a single wound and refuse to remain small.
Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
For revenge fantasy stripped down to its sharpest form, start here.
Monza Murcatto is the most feared mercenary captain in Styria until the duke she serves betrays her, murders her brother and throws her from a balcony. She survives, broken in body and changed in spirit, with seven names on her list.
What follows is a bloody journey through a country built on poison, politics and betrayal.
Abercrombie understands that revenge is never clean. Every name Monza crosses off costs her something. Every victory makes the rest of her world more dangerous. Her private vendetta soon becomes tangled up in a conflict that threatens cities, armies and nations.
The dialogue is sharp. The violence is ugly. The characters are compromised in ways that make them hard to trust and impossible to ignore.
Read this if you want revenge fantasy that is brutal, clever and morally murky. It earns its grimdark reputation.
The immortal ruler of the Final Empire took everything from him in the brutal slave pits where people are worked until they die. Kelsier survives, discovers extraordinary magical abilities, and comes out with a smile and a plan to bring the whole system down.
But this is not revenge with a dagger in an alleyway.
It is a heist. A rebellion. A plan to overthrow an empire that has stood for a thousand years. At its heart is Vin, a young street thief who becomes far more important than Kelsier first expects.
What begins as one man’s rage becomes a fight for hope.
Sanderson writes with clarity and momentum. The magic system is easy to understand but gives the action real weight, and the story keeps widening as it goes.
Read Mistborn if you want revenge fantasy that turns into revolution, adventure and something unexpectedly hopeful.
Rin claws her way out of poverty and into the Empire’s most prestigious military academy.
At first, The Poppy War has the shape of a school fantasy. There are rival students, brutal lessons, prejudice and a protagonist trying to prove she belongs in a world determined to keep her out.
Then war comes.
Rin’s anger, humiliation and need to prove herself become something much bigger once she is given real power. What begins as a personal struggle turns into a devastating story about war, atrocity and the terrible temptation of revenge.
Kuang does not make vengeance easy to cheer for. She forces you to sit with the consequences of it.
This is a hard book in places. It deals with extreme violence and horrific events. But for readers who want a revenge story that asks what happens when rage is handed the power to destroy nations, it is one of the strongest modern fantasy novels in the field.
By the time the story begins, he is fourteen years old, leading a band of cutthroats through a broken empire and willing to do terrible things to get what he wants.
The murder of Jorg’s family is the wound at the centre of the story. But his ambitions quickly grow beyond the people directly responsible. Revenge becomes a route towards power, then a route towards the throne itself.
Jorg is not a hero in any straightforward sense. He is cruel, clever and often deeply unpleasant.
That is the point.
Mark Lawrence writes an antihero who does not ask to be forgiven. The book is bleak, violent and darkly funny, with a ruined world gradually revealing more beneath the surface.
Read this if you want revenge fantasy with an unapologetically ruthless protagonist.
This is science fiction rather than traditional fantasy, but it belongs on this list.
Darrow is a Red, part of the lowest caste in a rigid society built on Mars. He believes he is helping prepare the planet for future generations. Then the ruling class murders his wife, and he learns the truth.
The surface has been habitable for centuries. His people have been enslaved by a lie.
Darrow’s grief becomes a mission. He is remade, sent into the world of the ruling Golds, and forced to survive a brutal proving ground designed to turn young people into leaders, killers and tyrants.
One woman’s death becomes a revolution against an entire civilisation.
The pace is relentless. The politics are ruthless. The stakes rise fast and keep rising.
Read Red Rising if you want a revenge story that becomes a war for the future of the world.
Jemisin begins with a woman whose husband has murdered their son and taken their daughter.
On the same day, the world itself begins to fall apart.
Essun sets out across a dying continent to find the man who wronged her and the child he has taken. That search leads into one of the most original fantasy worlds of recent years, a place shaped by catastrophe, oppression and the constant threat of destruction.
This is revenge folded into grief, apocalypse and a furious reckoning with power.
The personal story and the wider crisis are never separate. Essun’s loss is part of something far larger, and the structure of the novel reveals that connection with real force.
The prose is assured. The worldbuilding is unlike anything else. The book asks a great deal from the reader, but it pays that attention back.
Read The Fifth Season if you want revenge fantasy with literary weight and an uncompromising vision.
Sometimes the wound is inflicted on a family. Sometimes revenge becomes a war between clans.
In Janloon, jade gives power to those strong enough to wield it, and two rival families maintain an uneasy grip on the city. When that balance begins to break, the Kaul family is pulled into a conflict that costs them blood, loyalty and certainty.
What begins with insult, pride and violent reprisals becomes a fight for the future of an entire city.
Fonda Lee writes this with the energy of a great crime saga. Family obligations, political pressure, personal ambition and old grudges all tighten together until nobody can step away without losing something important.
Read Jade City if you want revenge fantasy with the sweep of a family epic and the tension of organised crime.
Soren is a sculptor’s apprentice in a quiet fishing town. He dreams of a bigger life and spends his days arguing with his best friend Alaric about whose work is worse.
Then he comes home and finds his father murdered.
Nothing has been stolen. The killer wanted something else, and nobody can tell Soren what.
Soren and Alaric set out to find the man responsible. Their search leads to rumours of an assassins’ guild, the kind of organisation the magistrates insist does not exist.
That is where the story grows.
The trail takes them far from home and into a remote training compound where recruits are tested against one another. They learn how to fight, hide, track, survive and kill. The only way out is to pass.
Soren begins with one question: who killed my father, and why?
But the deeper he goes, the harder question becomes this: what are you willing to become to get the answer?
I wanted the friendship between Soren and Alaric to sit at the heart of the story. They begin as two ordinary lads in over their heads, and their loyalty is tested when the Guild starts asking them to cross lines they cannot uncross.
It is fast-paced, friendship-led assassin fantasy with deadly training, wyverns, dark secrets and little romance.
Grief, rage and the refusal to let injustice stand are powerful reasons to act. They get characters moving when fear, caution or common sense might otherwise keep them at home.
But the best revenge fantasy books know that revenge is only the beginning.
It is a door.
Walk through it, and the world on the other side is bigger than your grief. The person you wanted to punish was only the nearest part of something much larger. The real cost is not always paid by your enemy.
Often, it is paid by you.
That is what makes these stories last. They are not simply about whether someone gets what they deserve. They are about what revenge does to the person who carries it.
Where to Start With Revenge Fantasy
For grimdark revenge at its finest, start with Best Served Cold.
For revenge that grows into rebellion and hope, choose Mistborn: The Final Empire.
For a devastating story about war and vengeance, read The Poppy War.
For an antihero you may not like but will struggle to forget, try Prince of Thorns.
And for a fast-paced assassin fantasy about friendship, grief and a murdered father’s unanswered questions, pick up Guild of Assassins.
Follow the wound.
It rarely leads where you expect.
Claim Your Free Copy of Guild Assassin
Behind every perfect assassination lies an imperfect conscience.
In a world where death is another transaction, Soren executes contracts with perfect precision.
Wielding a ravenglass dagger that hungers for essence and leaves only ash, he moves through the shadowy politics of Nordturm and beyond.
But when his targets begin to reflect the humanity he has tried to bury, the Guild’s most reliable assassin faces a different kind of contract: one written on his conscience.
From political schemes to quiet acts of rebellion, these dark fantasy tales examine the cost of loyalty and the unexpected mercy found in darkness.
Why I wrote a fantasy spy thriller about records, archives, and institutional power. A look at how paperwork, documentation, and official narratives inspired Silent Watcher.
When people hear “fantasy spy novel”, they tend to picture assassins, coded messages, secret meetings, and people passing sealed letters in dark alleyways.
There’s some of that in Silent Watcher.
But the thing that ended up fascinating me most wasn’t any of the spycraft.
Reports. Archives.Records. The mundane machinery by which institutions decide what officially happened.
And possibly one of the most frightening.
Think about how much of your understanding of reality depends on records. Who owns a house. Who owes a debt. Who was born. Who died. Whether something happened at all.
Most of us don’t rely on memory for those things. We rely on documentation.
A functioning society more or less depends on that.
You can’t run a country on competing recollections. So we trust the record.
The problem is that whoever controls the record controls something very close to reality itself.
That’s not a fantasy concept. That’s just how institutions work.
The version that gets stamped, filed, and archived almost always beats the version that exists only in someone’s memory.
The report becomes the truth.
Or at least the official version of it.
One of the things that interests me about institutions is that they can produce terrible outcomes without containing a single obviously evil person.
Fantasy often gives us a Dark Lord. Or a tyrant. Or a corrupt noble.
A person we can point at and blame.
Real life is often messier. A witness statement gets revised. A report gets adjusted. A death is recorded as an accident because accident is the category that closes the file.
Each decision seems small. Each decision seems reasonable. Everyone involved can honestly say they’re simply doing their job.
Yet by the end of the process, the official record describes a reality that never actually happened.
That’s what unsettles me.
Not the lie itself.
The fact that nobody involved necessarily thinks of themselves as lying.
That idea eventually became Silent Watcher.
The protagonist, Anselma, belongs to an order whose entire purpose is to observe and record events.
Her reports become the official account.
Her authority depends on documentation being trustworthy.
Which makes her the worst possible person to discover that the records may not be reliable.
She arrives in a quiet town to investigate the death of another Watcher.
The official report says everything is settled.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
Then she discovers reports in her own handwriting, carrying her own signature, authorising actions she has no memory of taking.
At that point, the investigation stops being about a dead colleague.
It becomes a question of whether she can trust anything at all.
Including herself.
One of the things fantasy does particularly well is take an ordinary fear and make it impossible to ignore.
Most of us have experienced that moment when the official version of events doesn’t quite match what we know happened.
Most of us have dealt with a form, a database, or a decision that suddenly feels more real than our own experience.
Fantasy lets you turn that feeling into the central conflict.
It lets you build a world where the record really is stronger than memory.
Where the paperwork can come for you.
Where the truth isn’t hidden.
It’s been replaced.
That’s the idea that sat underneath Silent Watcher from the beginning.
A document.
And the uncomfortable possibility that the document is wrong.
Silent Watcher is a standalone fantasy spy thriller about secrets, deception, and institutional betrayal.
For readers of Seth Dickinson, John le Carré, and K. J. Parker.
Looking for assassin academy books? Here are seven fantasy novels packed with secret schools, deadly training, rival recruits and hard choices.
There is a simple promise at the heart of an assassin academy story, and it gets me every time.
Take an ordinary young person. Put them somewhere built to turn them into a weapon. Then make them live with what that costs.
The lessons are only part of it. Blades, poisons, stealth, survival, reading people, and keeping calm when every instinct tells you to run. The real question is what happens when the training stops being theoretical.
A recruit can walk through the gates knowing nothing about killing. By the end, they may be able to take a life without hesitation. The moment that matters comes somewhere in between: the first time they are ordered to cross a line they cannot uncross.
What makes an assassin academy book work?
The best assassin schools feel like worlds in miniature.
They have rules, hierarchies, secrets and punishments. There are masters who know exactly how to make a student stronger, and may not care whether that student survives the process.
There are rival recruits too. A room full of people learning how to kill was never going to be a safe place to make friends.
Most importantly, there has to be a cost. These stories work when the training changes the characters in ways they did not expect. Killing cannot just be another skill to tick off a list. It has to leave a mark.
Here are seven assassin academy books for readers who want dangerous schools, rival recruits, hard choices and characters changed by what they learn.
At the Convent of Sweet Mercy, young girls are trained to become killers. Mark Lawrence makes the promise early: it takes an army to bring down one of the nuns the convent produces.
Nona Grey arrives bloodstained and condemned, taken from the gallows and given a place among girls who will become sisters, rivals and enemies. She learns blade work, poison, combat and stranger arts, while the wider world slowly begins to close in around her.
This is a patient book. It takes its time with the school, the friendships and the dangers beneath the surface.
Read Red Sisterfor fierce friendships, a strong sense of place, and an assassin school that feels old, secretive and genuinely dangerous.
Mia Corvere wants revenge. To get it, she enters the Red Church, a school for assassins devoted to a goddess of murder.
The training is brutal. The other acolytes are dangerous. Failure is not a disappointing grade or a stern word from a teacher. It can mean death.
Nevernight sits at the darker end of assassin fantasy. The prose is stylised, the violence is bloody, and the school itself is built around the knowledge that not everyone who enters will leave alive.
There is romance and adult content, so this is very much aimed at older readers. But for those who want assassin training with attitude, bloodshed and sharp edges, it delivers.
Celaena Sardothien is already a feared assassin when the story begins. She has survived a year in the salt mines and is offered one chance at freedom: win a competition against other killers.
The academy element is looser here than in the other books on this list. This is more trial by ordeal than classroom training. Still, the appeal is familiar: a deadly young woman, a brutal proving ground, and rivals who would be pleased to see her fail.
The series grows into something bigger, bringing in court politics, war, magic and romance. But the early books offer an accessible starting point for readers who want a confident heroine and plenty of forward momentum.
Some learn in secret, one lesson at a time, from a man who appears in the shadows and leaves before dawn.
FitzChivalry Farseer is the royal bastard nobody quite knows what to do with. He is trained to serve the crown as its hidden knife, while growing up among people who love him, need him, use him and place him in danger.
Robin Hobb is less interested in flashy training sequences than in what this life does to Fitz. The assassin work matters, but so do loneliness, loyalty, friendship and the weight of being used for a purpose he did not choose.
For readers who want emotional depth, difficult relationships and a protagonist who pays for every lesson, Assassin’s Apprentice remains one of the greats.
Azoth is a guild rat trying to survive the gutters of a brutal city. When he manages to become the apprentice of Durzo Blint, the deadliest wetboy alive, he gets exactly what he asked for.
It is not a school in the traditional sense. There are no classrooms or fellow pupils. But the apprenticeship is central: Azoth is taught how to kill, how to lie, how to endure pain, and how to survive a world that values people only for what they can do.
Brent Weeks writes with pace. The book moves quickly, the world is harsh from the beginning, and the relationship between Azoth and Durzo gives the story its heart.
This is a good choice for readers who want grit, action and a hard-edged mentor-and-apprentice story.
Grave Mercy takes the assassin academy idea and places it in a historical setting.
Ismae escapes a brutal marriage and finds refuge in the convent of St Mortain. There, she is trained in poisons, blades, seduction and the service of the old god of death.
Set against the political turmoil of medieval Brittany, the book blends court intrigue with a deadly education. The training matters, but so do Ismae’s choices about duty, faith and what it means to serve death.
This is a strong pick for readers who want assassin nuns, historical fantasy, and a romance that has room to breathe without taking over the whole story.
Soren is a sculptor’s apprentice in a quiet fishing town until he finds his father murdered in their home. Hunting the killer with his best friend Alaric leads him towards a guild neither of them was meant to find.
Before long, the pair are sent to a remote training compound where recruits learn to fight, hide, track, survive and kill. The masters test them against one another, and there is no easy way back to the lives they knew.
Soren and Alaric enter this world together, and their loyalty is tested as the training grows harsher and the guild begins asking more of them.
It is a fast-paced assassin fantasy with banter, deadly recruits, wyverns and no romance. The training is the spine of the book. The price of that training is the point.
For slow-burn worldbuilding and fierce friendships, start with Red Sister.
For something darker and more savage, choose Nevernight.
For character work and emotional weight, read Assassin’s Apprentice.
For fast-paced assassin training, friendship and a guild with no safe exit, try Guild of Assassins.
Every assassin academy story makes the same promise. Someone enters as one person and leaves as another.
The question is what they had to become to survive.
Claim Your Free Copy of Guild Assassin
Behind every perfect assassination lies an imperfect conscience.
In a world where death is another transaction, Soren executes contracts with perfect precision.
Wielding a ravenglass dagger that hungers for essence and leaves only ash, he moves through the shadowy politics of Nordturm and beyond.
But when his targets begin to reflect the humanity he has tried to bury, the Guild’s most reliable assassin faces a different kind of contract: one written on his conscience.
From political schemes to quiet acts of rebellion, these dark fantasy tales examine the cost of loyalty and the unexpected mercy found in darkness.
Most conspiracies don’t hide the truth. They create a new one. A look at records, institutions, agent provocateurs, and the ideas behind the fantasy spy thriller Silent Watcher.
When most people think of a conspiracy, they imagine a secret.
A hidden document. A buried truth. A meeting that took place behind closed doors.
The assumption is that the truth exists somewhere, intact and waiting to be discovered. If you can find it, you’ve solved the puzzle.
But I’ve become increasingly interested in a different kind of conspiracy.
One that doesn’t hide the truth.
One that writes a new version of it.
Instead of burying the record, it creates the record.
And that’s much harder to fight.
A hidden secret is vulnerable. Someone talks. A document leaks. A witness comes forward.
But what happens when the official version is already public?
What happens when the lie is stamped, filed, cross-referenced, and accepted as fact?
Between the official account and the person insisting it happened differently.
Most institutions are built to trust records. That’s not a flaw. It’s how they function. Courts, governments, businesses, historians, and archivists all depend on documentation.
The person who understands that doesn’t need to destroy the system.
They just need to feed it.
This isn’t really about shadowy cabals. The methods themselves are old.
We tend to think of infiltrators as people who gather intelligence. Sometimes they do. But sometimes they’re there to create the thing they later report on.
A group grumbles. An infiltrator pushes. The group becomes more extreme. Violence follows.
The violence is real.
The arrests are real.
The official report is technically accurate.
The lie sits elsewhere.
The lie is that the people writing the report helped create the event they are now documenting.
Every clue might be a clue because someone wanted it found.
At a certain point, certainty disappears altogether.
The investigator can no longer trust the records.
But they can’t function without them either.
That’s what makes authored truth so dangerous.
A hidden truth can be recovered.
An authored truth attacks the idea of truth itself.
The real version becomes just another competing story.
One person’s memory against an entire archive.
I started thinking about these ideas because I wanted to write about them.
Eventually that became Silent Watcher.
The protagonist, Anselma, belongs to an organisation responsible for observing events and producing the official record. She’s sent to a quiet town to investigate the death of another Watcher.
The official report says everything is resolved.
The town disagrees.
The evidence disagrees.
Then she discovers documents in her own handwriting, carrying her own signature, authorising actions she has no memory of taking.
It’s a fantasy novel.
But the machinery underneath it isn’t really fantasy at all.
It’s about institutions that no longer need to hide the truth because they’ve learned something more effective.
They can write it.
And once they do, the hardest thing isn’t proving the conspiracy.
It’s proving that your version of events deserves to be believed at all.
Silent Watcher is a standalone fantasy spy novel for readers of Seth Dickinson, John le Carré, and K. J. Parker.
Ten indie fantasy books to read if you love John Gwynne, from dragon riders and old gods to rebellion, war, loyalty and hard-won heroism.
John Gwynne readers tend to know what they are looking for.
Big battles. Deep loyalties. Old gods, monsters, bloodshed, and characters trying to do the right thing when the world gives them every reason not to. You want stakes that feel real, but you also want people worth fighting for.
The good news is that there is plenty of fantasy out there for you.
The better news is that some of the strongest books in that space are being published independently.
The ten books below all come from indie authors. That means supporting writers who have chosen to build their own careers, publish on their own terms, and take their work directly to readers rather than waiting for approval from the corporate publishing machine.
Independent fantasy is no longer a fallback option. It is where many of the genre’s most exciting writers are working: authors able to take risks, write the stories they want to write, and put out books at a pace traditional publishing often cannot match.
These are not copies of John Gwynne’s work. They each bring something of their own. But if you love the scale, heart, grit, found-family loyalty, and hard-won heroism of The Faithful and the Fallenor The Bloodsworn Saga, there should be something here for you.
Here are ten indie fantasy books to try after John Gwynne.
Herald begins in a world still living with the consequences of a war against Heaven itself.
Ancient terrors are returning, tyrant kings hunt the blood of gods, and a prophecy draws together three people from very different corners of the world.
There is a sense of large-scale danger here that should appeal to readers who enjoy the gathering darkness of The Faithful and the Fallen.
Hayes brings gods, monsters, war, and desperate acts of courage together in a story that feels built for readers who like their epic fantasy big.
Dragon’s Reach follows Sable, a thief from the slums who can tell when people are lying.
Her attempt to escape a gang boss instead pulls her into a wider struggle against the Kalesh Empire and the lies holding it together.
Along the way, she gathers an unlikely group of companions, each carrying secrets of their own.
This is a good choice for Gwynne readers who like resistance against empire, a growing band of allies, and a story where truth can be as dangerous as a sword.
Set during the First Crusade, Oaths of Blood begins with mercenary captain Robert Cutnose preparing to storm Jerusalem.
What waits inside the city is worse than anything the siege has prepared him for, drawing him into an ancient conflict between secret orders, immortal hunters, and blood-soaked relics.
The historical setting gives the violence and religious conflict a raw edge, while the supernatural threat keeps widening beyond one man’s revenge.
Readers who like the brutality, battle scenes, and moral greyness of darker Gwynne might want to start here.
The Way of Edan is a big, thoughtful epic fantasy about holy war, prophecy, cultural conflict, and the people caught beneath them.
The Way of Edan by Philip Chase
The expansionist Kingdom of the Eternal is pushing its faith across Eormenlond by force, while resistance grows among those facing conversion or conquest.
At the centre is Dayraven, a young man carrying a curse that may shape the future of the world.
It has the old-world weight, emotional seriousness, and Anglo-Saxon flavour that make it an easy recommendation for fans of John Gwynne.
Makerborn opens after a god war, in an empire built on slavery, fear, and the suffering left behind by victory.
Alandra serves the empire that stole her daughter, while Bez survives torture and experimentation with only vengeance keeping him alive.
Their personal struggles pull them towards secrets that could unravel the empire itself.
It is darker than Gwynne’s work in places, but readers who enjoy flawed characters fighting through grief, loyalty, and impossible choices should find plenty to hold onto.
Empire of Ruin is set in a nation built on conquest, where the emperor has turned magic into a weapon of genocide.
As old enemies return and the empire’s lies begin to fracture, several characters are forced to question their loyalties, their history, and the people they trusted.
The threat is large, but the story keeps its focus on family, divided allegiances, and the human cost of war.
Gwynne readers who enjoy huge stakes, magic with consequences, and characters trying to do the right thing inside a failing system should find a lot here.
The Fall of Wolfsbane follows Ragnar and Maja Wolfsbane after the Ostreich Empire conquers their home, kills their father, and takes them into the heart of the enemy’s world.
Ragnar is raised among imperial warriors and wyverns, while Maja must survive court politics with a dangerous gift for influencing minds.
Readers who enjoy Gwynne’s mix of family loyalty, hard choices, rebellion, and the slow rise of heroes should find plenty to enjoy here.
John Gwynne has set a high bar for epic fantasy: stories with real darkness, characters worth caring about, and courage that costs something.
Every book here comes from an independent author, which means every read, review, recommendation, and newsletter sign-up makes a practical difference.
Supporting indie fantasy is not charity. It is a way of finding ambitious books that might never have made it through the narrow gates of corporate publishing.
I have put The Fall of Wolfsbane at the end because it is my own book, and I wanted the rest of this list to stand on its own first. But if you enjoy conquest and rebellion, wyverns, divided loyalties, and characters trying to hold onto themselves inside an empire built on violence, I hope you will give it a try.
And if there is an indie fantasy book John Gwynne fans should know about, leave it in the comments. There are always more stories worth finding.
