What to read after “One Dark Window” by Rachel Gillig: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Catalia works as a soothsayer in a travelling circus, hiding the power that once made her a pawn of the gods. Griffin, a warlord desperate to save his people, recognises her magic and carries her off to his kingdom. On the long road there, loathing turns into a bond neither of them wanted and neither can deny.
Signa has been passed between guardians who wanted her inheritance, and death has followed her all her life. At Thorn Grove she finds a family in mourning and a mother's ghost who claims she was poisoned. To find the killer Signa works with Death himself, a shadow she has known since childhood and now cannot stop wanting.
Auren has been King Midas's gilded favourite for years, kept in a golden cage and told she is safe there. Cruelty and control shape every part of her life, and she believes she has no other choice. Then a new king arrives at the castle, and the cracks in her golden world begin to widen.
Feyre survived Amarantha's trials, but the cost has left her breaking. On her wedding day Rhysand takes her to the Night Court, where she learns to use her new powers while a war with Hybern gathers. Trust grows between them as old loyalties and a dangerous bargain pull her in different directions.
Evangeline Fox believes in true love until she learns that the boy she loves is about to marry her stepsister. Desperate, she makes a bargain with Jacks, a charming, dangerous young man known as a Fate. Their deal pulls her into a world of magic and curses, where every promise has a price and every wish can go wrong.
Yelena is given a choice: die for her crime, or become the Commander's food taster and risk poison at every meal. Her trainer is the assassin Valek, guarded and dangerous, and working beside him builds a trust neither expected. Then she learns her own past may be more deadly than any poison.
Alizeh hides in plain sight as a servant, keeping the secret that she is heir to a lost magical kingdom and the subject of a prophecy she wants no part of. Kamran is the crown prince, bound to protect his grandfather's throne. He does not know who she truly is, and the truth could destroy them both.
Talasyn has known nothing but the Hurricane Wars: raised as an orphan in a nation under siege by the Night Empire, she hides her light magic and fights alongside its soldiers. Alaric is the empire's crown prince and her sworn enemy on the battlefield. When a greater threat and a royal marriage alliance force them together, the two must work side by side, and their powers answer to each other in ways no one can explain.
Luella was raised to be an ordinary healer, not the human bride the Elf King demands. When he comes to claim her, she is taken to Midscape, where her touch can wake the sleeping land. Trapped with a cold, distant husband, she must find a way home or accept a destiny she never wanted.
Nesta Archeron has survived war and transformation, but she cannot forgive herself for what she lost or forget what she did. Sent to train with Cassian in the House of Wind, she is forced to face her anger, her grief and the bond between them while a new threat gathers in the mortal lands.
Hart is a lonely marshal who hunts the undead; Mercy runs her family's funeral home and finds Hart insufferable. After a bitter week, each writes an anonymous letter to a stranger, and a warm correspondence begins without either knowing who is on the other end. Meanwhile, real life keeps forcing them together.
Every ten years the wizard known as the Dragon takes one girl from Agnieszka's valley. When he chooses her instead of her best friend, she is carried to his tower, where she discovers a talent for magic, a growing bond with her cold teacher and the corrupted Wood that threatens them all.
Severian is raised in the guild of torturers and exiled from his city after an act of mercy. He narrates his own travels across a dying world, but his perfect memory is perfect only in his own account, and the past conceals far more than he admits.
Born with a scarlet mote in one eye, Phedre is sold into servitude and raised as a spy and courtesan. When she uncovers a plot against her home, she is captured in a barbarian land and must endure pain, betrayal and exile to warn her people and stop an invasion.
When the Empire of Masks conquers her island home, Baru Cormorant hides her hatred and joins the imperial civil service. Sent to a restless province as an accountant, she works to rise high enough to free her people, even as her choices cost her the woman she loves.
Kell is one of the last Antari, magicians who can travel between four parallel Londons: Red, Grey, White and the lost Black. After a smuggling exchange goes wrong, he flees into Grey London and meets Lila Bard, a thief who talks her way into his journey. Together they must keep a dangerous object from falling into the wrong hands.
Csorwe was raised to be a sacrifice to the Unspoken One, until the wizard Belthandros offers her another life. Trained as his assassin and servant, she is sent to find a lost city and a door between worlds, and begins to wonder whether her second life is any freer than her first.
Yeine Darr is summoned from her northern homeland to the city of Sky, where she is named an heir to the Arameri throne after her mother's death. As she learns the rules of a court that keeps gods as servants, she finds that the contest for the succession is also a trap.
Azoth survives as a guild rat in the slums of Cenaria, where life is cheap. To escape he apprentices himself to Durzo Blint, the city's most feared assassin, and must abandon his old name and life to become Kylar Stern, a killer schooled in dangerous magic and politics.
Sabriel has grown up safely across the Wall, far from the Old Kingdom and its dead. When her father, the Abhorsen, vanishes, she crosses into a land where the dead walk and takes up his bells and his duty. With a free magic creature and a trapped soldier, she sets out to find him.
A street criminal offers six dangerous outcasts a fortune to break into an impregnable fortress and rescue a captive inventor. The heist needs a plan no one has tried before, and none of the crew trusts the others.
In an ash-covered empire, a street thief is trained in allomancy, the magic of burning metals. She joins a crew planning to overthrow the immortal Lord Ruler, though the prophecy around her may be a lie.
Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer sets out from New Hampshire to California to find a talisman that may save his dying mother. His road runs through the Territories, a parallel world where many people have counterparts, and where the same journey carries dangers he could never face in his own world.
Kinch Na Shannack owes his guild of thieves more than he can ever pay. To settle the debt he tags along with a scarred knight on a journey to find women taken by goblins, through a world of old wars, hungry gods and creatures that would happily eat a thief.
Start with “A Promise of Fire”, “Belladonna”, “Gild”: they are the closest to “One Dark Window” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “One Dark Window” these are Romantasy, Gothic, Dark Fantasy), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “A Promise of Fire”, “Belladonna”, “Gild”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
