Books like Tasha Suri

Touraine was stolen from her homeland as a child and raised as a soldier of the empire that conquered it. Returning with her regiment, she encounters rebels who see a traitor and Princess Luca, a cerebral imperial heir who hopes Touraine can become her instrument.

Like Malini and Priya, these women are drawn together across a gulf of power that neither desire nor good intentions can erase. Clark makes every intimate gesture politically charged: trust can be collaboration, love can become leverage, and belonging is never simple after colonial violence has shaped your very sense of self. A major modern work of queer military fantasy, The Unbroken is the book to read when you want The Jasmine Throne’s moral knots pulled even tighter.

A famine-stricken girl takes the identity—and foretold greatness—of her dead brother, then pursues that destiny with a will so fierce it seems capable of remaking reality. What begins as survival soon becomes a study of appetite: for recognition, power, love, and the right to define oneself.

Parker-Chan matches Suri’s gift for making ambition both exhilarating and terrifying. Their characters do not seek clean heroism; they seize whatever identities, loyalties, and relationships might carry them beyond powerlessness. The prose has the sweep of legend but stays painfully close to bodily hunger and private longing. A Hugo finalist that inspired unusually fervent readers, it offers one of contemporary fantasy’s most magnetic portraits of a person deciding that greatness matters more than goodness.

When an expansionist empire absorbs Baru’s island home, she resolves to defeat it using the weapon it prizes most: her own intelligence. She enters its schools, masters its economics, and accepts an official post—believing she can climb high enough to destroy the machine from within.

If The Jasmine Throne thrilled you because strategy is inseparable from emotional cost, Baru’s campaign is essential reading. Dickinson treats administration, money, and social engineering as instruments of conquest, making a ledger feel as dangerous as a sword. Baru is brilliant, queer, disciplined, and frighteningly willing to turn herself into what her enemy rewards. The novel’s devoted reputation rests on how relentlessly it tests her premise: can anyone use an empire’s methods without letting those methods remake them? It is devastating political fantasy, and difficult to forget.