What to read after “The Subtle Knife” by Philip Pullman: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
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.
Lyra Belacqua lives among the scholars of Oxford in a world where every person has an animal companion called a daemon. When children begin to disappear, she travels north with a mysterious instrument and a fierce armored bear to uncover a conspiracy about the substance called Dust.
Children who have returned from magical worlds struggle to readjust, so Eleanor West's home gives them somewhere to belong. When Nancy arrives from the Halls of the Dead, she finds the school hiding its own dangers and a mystery that threatens her new friends.
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 device called a stepper lets people walk sideways into an endless chain of parallel Earths, each empty of humans. Joshua Valiente, one of the few who can step without help, joins an expedition aboard an airship to chart the Long Earth, while settlers and explorers discover that the further they travel, the stranger the worlds become.
Gen has been locked in the king's prison of Sounis for boasting that he can steal anything. Freed by the king's magus, he is dragged along on a hunt for an ancient artifact that could settle the fate of three nations, and he schemes, complains and remembers more than he admits.
Bastian, a lonely boy, steals a book about the dying world of Fantastica. As he reads he is drawn into it, and discovers that only he can give the Childlike Empress a new name and stop the Nothing from swallowing the land.
Nathaniel is a young apprentice magician who summons the djinni Bartimaeus to steal a powerful amulet from a politician. The djinni is clever, sarcastic and far from willing, and the theft sets off a fight that neither of them expected to survive.
In 1925 the explorer Percy Fawcett walked into the Amazon to find a fabled civilization he called Z, and never came out. Decades later a journalist follows the same trails, sifting clues and rumors to learn what became of the missing expedition.
Fifteen-year-old Christopher discovers the neighbour's dog stabbed to death and sets out to solve the mystery in the style of his favourite detective stories. His investigation uncovers hidden truths about his own family and forces him into a world he finds overwhelming.
Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a luxury airship that crosses the oceans. When a pirate raid and a storm leave the ship stranded on a remote island, Matt and a rich passenger's daughter, Kate, search for the flying creatures her grandfather claimed to have seen before the pirates close in.
In the kingdom of Carthya, a nobleman gathers orphan boys and tells them that one must learn to pass as the lost prince Jaron, or die. Sage is quick, defiant and unwilling to play the part, but the game he is forced into has rules no one has told him, and a prize worse than a crown.
Amani Al'Hiza lives in Dustwalk, a dead-end desert town, and hides two things: she can shoot like a legend, and she is half djinn. Refusing a blackmail marriage and a future in Dustwalk, she disguises herself and joins a stranger heading into the desert, where a rebellion is gathering.
Richter expects a new virtual world to be a game, then wakes trapped inside it. Alone in a monster-filled forest, he learns its rules, gathers resources and experience, and begins building a settlement, while the world's other powers take notice of the newcomer.
Blue has grown up in a house of psychics and is warned she will cause her true love's death. Drawn into the search for a lost Welsh king with a group of boys from a prestigious school, she finds her life tangled with theirs and with their dangerous families.
A man wakes in a hospital with no memory, drives out against his doctors' advice and begins to piece together who he is. He turns out to be Corwin, a prince of Amber, and Amber is the true world of which Earth is only a shadow.
After a catastrophic injury leaves him paralyzed, former combat medic Joe transfers his consciousness permanently into a new full-immersion game. There he chooses the ritualist class, a secretive path most players ignore, and studies obscure lore, follows hidden quests and bends the game's rules in pursuit of real power.
Irene is a professional spy for the Library, an institution that collects books from alternate worlds. Sent with her new assistant Kai to a chaos-infested version of London where airships, vampires and fey exist, she must recover a dangerous book that has already been stolen, and the mission quickly turns into a struggle over the nature of reality itself.
On his eleventh birthday, Will Stanton learns that he is the last of the Old Ones, born to hold back the Dark. As midwinter closes over the Thames valley, he must gather the six Signs of Light before the Rider and his powers can rise. A tale of the Light's long war against the Dark.
Prince Rhen is cursed to relive his eighteenth year as a monster until a girl falls in love with him. Harper, torn from the modern world into his dying kingdom, only wants to go home, but the curse and the enemy at the gates will not wait.
Percy Jackson, a twelve-year-old who keeps getting expelled, learns he is a demigod and is accused of stealing Zeus's master bolt. With Annabeth and Grover he crosses America to return it, facing monsters and gods to stop a war on Olympus.
On her sixteenth birthday Meghan learns that her little brother has been swapped for a changeling and that the fey are real. To get him back she enters the Nevernever, a dangerous world divided between Summer and Winter courts, where she is drawn to a prince she was raised to fear.
Four years after Mal vanished on Bodmin Moor, she returns with no explanation. A security investigator and a physicist are drawn into the same case, which leads to cracks between our world and a series of parallel Earths where evolution took very different paths. As the doors open, creatures long separated from humanity begin to cross over.
Start with “A Darker Shade of Magic”, “The Talisman”, “Northern Lights”: they are the closest to “The Subtle Knife” 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 “The Subtle Knife” these are Parallel Worlds, Portal Fantasy, Coming of Age), 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 Darker Shade of Magic”, “Every Heart a Doorway”, “The Long Earth”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
