5 hand-picked fantasy and cultural identity books curated by NextBookAfter.
If Jade City's clan wars and family betrayal had you in a chokehold, Black Sun is your next obsession. Pre-Columbian empires collide, prophecies demand blood sacrifice, and every alliance carves wounds across generations. Power isn't inherited—it's seized through sabotage and the kind of moral compromise that made the Kaul family devastatingly real.
If Katabasis's savage takedown of colonial theft left you breathless, Black Water Sister weaponizes Malaysian spirits against diaspora erasure with the same intellectual ferocity. Morally compromised heroines, ancestral possession as metaphor, and dialogue that eviscerates cultural hypocrisy—this is fantasy that refuses to comfort you.
If Hamingje's brutal Nordic folklore left you craving myths that unsettle rather than soothe, Pet dismantles utopian surfaces to expose the monsters we refuse to name. Emezi delivers that same lyrical, unsparing prose rooted in cultural truth—Igbo mythology meeting contemporary dread—with a transgender protagonist navigating ethical tangles as raw and unflinching as Westergaard's flawed isolationists. This is folk horror for readers who demand ancestral stories that linger like open wounds.
Dive into the shadowy glamour of Old Hollywood where a fierce, ambitious woman battles monstrous studios and hidden desires to claim her stardom, blending fierce ambition, forbidden romance, and the high cost of fame in a way that echoes Evelyn Hugo's captivating rise.
If Spinning Silver's fusion of Eastern European folklore, economic hardship, and morally complex heroines kept you reading past midnight, this is your next obsession. Ava Reid weaves Hungarian mythology and Jewish influences into a world where persecution drives every desperate alliance, magic extracts brutal costs, and survival demands cunning over heroics. No vapid fantasy here—just raw folklore where power always demands payment.