Books like Megan Whalen Turner

Mosca Mye—a fierce, literate runaway—falls in with a magnificently unscrupulous wordsmith and brings along Saracen, her homicidal goose. Hardinge turns their flight into a contest among guilds, religions, printers, and con artists, all described with verbal fireworks worthy of Gen’s most brazen performances.

Like Turner, Hardinge makes a seemingly playful journey disclose a much larger political design. Alliances keep changing meaning, minor details prove load-bearing, and cleverness is never merely decorative: words can alter who holds power. This Branford Boase Award–winning debut has the rare combination of exuberance and exact construction. Missing it means missing one of children’s fantasy’s great trickster heroines—and certainly its greatest goose.

If Gen’s ability to be simultaneously infuriating, theatrical, and several moves ahead was the chief delight, meet Francis Crawford of Lymond. He returns to sixteenth-century Scotland an outlaw, then proceeds to bewilder enemies, allies, and readers with displays of brilliance that may be heroism, treachery, or both.

Dunnett refuses to explain Lymond before his actions have earned their consequences. Her intricate dialogue, strategic misdirection, and spectacular set pieces demand attention—and reward rereading with the realization that the evidence was always present. This is denser and more adult than Turner, but it offers the closest equivalent to that intoxicating experience of discovering that the apparently reckless protagonist has understood the board all along. The first of the six Lymond Chronicles has inspired unusually devoted readers for decades; once its design becomes visible, one book is rarely enough.

Cazaril arrives in Valenda exhausted, scarred, and hoping for an inconspicuous household position. Instead, his appointment as secretary-tutor to the Royesse Iselle places him near a court where dynastic pressure, intimate loyalties, and divine purposes are perilously entangled.

The kinship with The Thief lies less in deception than in precision. Bujold builds a theology whose rules genuinely shape human choices, then lets political intelligence and moral courage operate within those limits. Cazaril’s humility conceals formidable competence, while Iselle has the alertness and will of Turner’s best royal characters. Winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, this is beloved not simply for its plotting but for its humane conviction that damaged people can still act effectively in a world governed by powers they only partly understand. Its climax feels at once astonishing and inevitable—the hardest trick in fantasy.