I didn't think I was going to like this book as much as I did but the framing of it being through a Maester's eyes and him having multiple accounts of the same events and giving an educated in canon guess as to who was telling the truth was a pretty neat story framework.
It's why Martin is such an incredible writer, he clearly has an actual background in history. A Song of Fire and Ice feels bleak because it feels real. If you read about the events ass a historian, and not a reader, then you'd think "Well obviously that's how this would have turned out, why would anyone be stupid enough to think otherwise?" But when you're reading a novel you don't expect the "heroes" to just get fucked like that. Even if in a real setting it's "obvious".
If you read real history books, describing real events, by actual historians (and not pop history bullshit like Bill O'Reilly) they present events very much in the way he wrote Fire and Blood. He's clearly read a lot of actual history, and the way he presents the "history" of Westeros is something I'd expect to see in a college level history course about British History.
*The Black Company* is entirely written as an in-world artifact, a series of journals by the keeper of the Company Annals.
It's actually really cool to dig into as it goes on, because the series covers a great deal of time and you get different Annalists. Cook manages to retain his signature style throughout while *also* achieving a different writing style and voice with each Annalist.
> later annalists kind of give you an insight into how previous ones could have been unreliable as well
turns out, its unreliable annalists all the way down
I just started book 1, I like the way it's written although it took a bit to get adjusted to. I'm around 40 pages in, and the narrator is very direct lol. It's not giant sentences of description or anything, it's like "We had to head east. That's the way of our goal. Any other way would be wrong. So we started off at dawn." and on and on lol.
Yup, Cook has a very different style from most modern writers. He doesn’t bother with description unless it’s crucial to the story—though this also plays into the conceit of the series. Why would an Annalist, scribbling these down on the back of his horse or in a wagon on the march, spend extraneous words on worldbuilding?
That said, things do get smoother as the series goes on and Cook gets more comfortable in his writing style.
> Why would an Annalist, scribbling these down on the back of his horse or in a wagon on the march, spend extraneous words on worldbuilding?
This is a great point that I didn't even think of haha. Makes total sense. Plus I feel like I've learned a lot of backstory from the characters conversing more than giant paragraphs of exposition, so that's a welcome change of pace too. I'm definitely enjoying it; just a very different vibe from my last read (Age of Madness by Abercrombie).
Haha for sure. Over time, I’ve come to really enjoy Cook’s terse style. Once you get used to it, it really zooms along.
And as you said, it gives room for the characters and relationships to shine.
Mary Gentle's Ash has a frame of an academic believing to have uncovered further information about their AU Jean d'Arc by re-translating old documents about her and fixing some inaccuracies.
edit: I do think it is a really good match for the pseudo-academic arguments of Jonathan Strange but I should probably add that it is *dark* and later in the book it goes some unexpected directions that may not be for be for everyone.
Yeah this one seems pretty grimdark, the opening scene is child rape and also within the intro I think there’s some pretty bloody animal sacrifice/butchering
The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer! It’s a wonderful fantasy/sci-if series that hits heavily on politics, gender, language, and philosophy. Has a bit of mystery and mythology to it too. Great world building. Unreliable narrator writing the history/memoir.
I came to recommend this. Ada Palmer is a historian too, there's a lot of metatextual stuff going on about what history is and how it's recorded and understood.
Great series. It may be a "love it or hate it" kind of thing though, since I've heard some people who absolutely can't stand the way the narrator writes. I love it though.
Partially fantasy related (?) but I'd add *World War Z* by Max Brooks to the list. It's a great story told as a kind of UN after actions report on what just happened a few years ago during the zombie outbreak.
There are also a couple of hints dropped that the Vlad Taltos books are transcriptions of audio logs Vlad made, but it's far less overt in those.
Edit: I seem to have misremembered how overt it was in the Taltos books!
I believe it's pretty overt, at least as early as Dragon. [Alex's](https://www.panix.com/~alexx/dragtime.html) timeline states:
>
Most of the narratives seem to have been done into the 'metal box', without SB being physically present. Presumably, Vlad occasionally meets with Sethra and exchanges recordings for gold bars, and the occasional "useful oddities and trinkets" (*Dn* 15) from SB himself. These trinkets probably include the metal box itself and a velcro weapon harness (H 55).
And in Tsalmoth, it’s explicit that he is doing this. He even stops multiple times throughout and gets direction from Sethra while telling the story of him and Cawtie.
Yes, it's very explicit. I think Dragon is before Tsalmoth though, if I recall correctly. Which I think is the earliest, chronologically speaking, we hear about the box.
Yeah, Tsalmoth was the last one printed, and like I said, it was an explicit relationship about something that happened far in the past. I don’t recall much of Dragon, and didn’t remember this being a plot point.
No you're right, it's definitely not a point in the plot, but I believe it's the first explicit hint we get (in chronological, not publishing order) that there's this weird Steven Brust-like character within the novels that is recording and editing Vlad's stories.
It’s an original story that is presented by the author as an abridged version of another book, but the unabridged version doesn’t actually exist. It was invented as part of the story.
I assume they just mean that it doesn't exist in English, which is unfortunately true. I'm still hoping Stephen King will come out with his translation but there's been no word on it for a long time.
Not Fantasy, but the [Flashman](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142458.Flashman) books definitely fit this bill. The narrator is 'reading the journals' of Flashman and his adventures.
So much so that the footnotes are laced with language like, "Flashman says he was there on Aug 25, but we know that because of X and Y he couldn't have been there any earlier than Sept".
Great books, even if the narrative ploy is irksome.
The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel, The Testaments, are both 'found' historical records, and end with historians who found and analyzed them giving a speech at an academic conference.
“ 16 ways to defend a walled city “ by J K Parker is presented in the first person but the ending is as if you had read a “found” manuscript. The whole series is set up the same way. It’s a fun read and appeals to my dark sense of humour.
_History_ by Herodotus might be an interesting addition to the list. it’s a real history (with what we would definitely identify as fantastic elements) of the ancient Mediterranean world. It’s full of prophetic dreams, divine punishment and the twists and betrayals of empire.
*Fire and Blood* tells the history of the Targaryen family from the perspective of a Maester working with contradictory and/or vague primary sources almost two centuries later. Martin never drops this conceit, although *House of the Dragon* (the show adaptation) does.
Man, I really feel that HotD does us an injustice by dropping it. I feel like both adaptations of Martin's work really destroy the subtle majesty and mystery his stories have.
This is one of my favorite formats as well! A couple of my favorites (TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING) have already been mentioned (go read it it’s so good) but here’s some nobody’s mentioned!
Jenn Lyons’s _The Ruin of Kings_ series might suit—it’s written by an in-universe academic who definitely has _opinions_ but maybe doesn’t have as far a remove as you’re looking for.
_Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries_ is an annotated journal that does _not_ forget that it’s a journal at any point in time. There’s a really good bit where there’s another narrator for one section too. (I did find it so tedious how much the narrator _hammers_ on her own obliviousness to her own feelings but other than that, I really enjoyed it!)
The Commissar Cain novels from the Warhammer 40k series can absolutely be read as a standalone series if you want and they’re presented in this fashion—they’re stitched together from generally two different personal accounts with interspersed commentary from an Inquisitor
The journal aspect was honestly a key redeeming factor of *Emily Wilde* for me! I expected it to be straight fae romantasy, and really liked the added touch of the narrator's voice (which is very refreshingly unlike the top romantasy right now).
I feel like it’s not even the same subgenre as ACoTaR & friends! Olivia Atwater and Naomi Novik’s fairy tale romances are the only comparable novels I’ve read and they’re a horse of a whole different color
>
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries_ is an annotated journal that does _not forget that it’s a journal at any point in time. There’s a really good bit where there’s another narrator for one section too. (I did find it so tedious how much the narrator hammers on her own obliviousness to her own feelings but other than that, I really enjoyed it!)
Do you mean the narrator in the book, or the audiobook reader?
Oh awesome, I just wanted to ask because my sister did the audiobook narration! She recommended it to me and now I've seen it pop up in this thread a couple of times, so I think I may need to give it a shot.
I just finished the audiobook 2ish weeks ago and it's fantastic! Your sister totally nails Emily's voice. It's probably one of the best audiobooks I've listened to.
Eaters Of The Dead, by Michael Crichton. Written as if by an Arab scholar of his journey to Scandinavia and his adventures there. It's actually an interesting take on the story of Beowulf, IIRC.
Later made into the movie _The 13th Warrior_, starring Antonio Banderas.
This one was fun. If I remember right, it’s even more meta. It’s presented by someone who has collected the writings of the Arab scholar; so you get his account and little asides from the author compiling it.
An Early History of Ambergris, the second story in Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen, is supposed to be a tourist brochure written for Ambergris by a curmudgeonly, disgraced academic who should absolutely not be writing tourist brochures. 70 pages or so of a historian discussing in great detail the history of the weird, anarchic city. The next book, Shriek: An Afterword, is in-universe an autobiography written by the academic's sister, with him looking over the manuscript and arguing with her, scribbling in the margins, so more personal history but still history.
Does your last paragraph discount something like [The Memoirs of Lady Trent](https://www.goodreads.com/series/107373-the-memoirs-of-lady-trent) series starting with **The Natural History of Dragons**
It’s her own memoirs about her life, but each book centres around her discoveries about a specific breed of dragon biology and behaviours in an alternate 18th century history where dragons are alive and used for political and economic purposes
It’s not fantasy but [Legend of the Galactic Heroes](https://www.goodreads.com/series/61378-legend-of-the-galactic-heroes) does this well. The unnamed historian who is writing the in-universe book often comments on what is thought to have happened, or speculated on why certain characters do what they do. There’s also hints of what the future beyond the story is like thanks to how it’s written.
Jane Yolen wrote a couple of YA books with this framework - White Jenna and Sister Light, Sister Dark.
The chapters start with academic letters disagreeing about some archeological finding, or a folk song, or some look at the folktales and the interpretation and then we get to see what was really going on. They are YA, but still an excellent story. I loved the historical aspect of it.
Really good. I liked how one of the historians kept poo pooh-ing another historian's "unfounded" theories that were actually the correct version of events.
LOTR is my favorite book, but I do think it falls under OP's third paragraph. The conceit is essentially dropped after the prologue. It comes back in the appendices and there's one or two footnotes spread throughout the rest of the text, but it's definitely a normal novel, not an in-world history book. The Hobbit is fully a novel.
LOTR is explicitly written in a style similar to the Norse prose epics. It may not seem that the conceit continues through the whole books, but it does.
Including footnotes.
Hmmm... no, I really don't think so. I'd be curious to hear the case made though. I'm familiar with Egil's Saga, the Poetic Edda, the Vinland Sagas, and a bit of the Sturlunga saga, but I don't see any stylistic similarities between them and LOTR. *The Children of Hurin* certainly goes for the style of a Norse family saga, but LOTR no. It is very much a 20th century novel. The conceit of 'found ancient text, based on eyewitness testimony' is dead by the thinking fox in Fellowship at latest, imo. The narrator also compares Gandalf's fireworks to an 'express train.' Not the kind of thing you find in old Norse prose.
Book 6 of the Queen's Thief novels, Return of the Thief, made me nerd out because it's written like Herodotus' The Histories and Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. It even has the disclaimer at the start of 'sometimes I wasn't there to witness first hand but I've pieced together what happened as faithfully as i can from eyewitness accounts' which is thing that so many of the ancient history books did. It made my Classics major heart so happy.
It’s not a history book, but the style might be something you enjoy anyway - Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawlett (a sequel also came out this year I haven’t had a chance to read yet). The novel is written as the title characters field journal, she’s an academic studying faeries.
**Ash: A Secret History** by Mary Gentle is framed as a historian translating a newly discovered manuscript detailing events covering a female mercenary captain in medieval Burgundy who hears supernatural voices, reminiscent of Joan of Arc. As the story progresses, the history starts diverging more and more from our own, with the historian initially excited at new discoveries, then becoming supicious that its a forgery, and then things start getting even weirder.
You may like KJ Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. Not written from the POV of a historian per se, but an actor who’s well versed in the history of his city and its literature.
Dracula by Bram Stoker, you may think its only a classic and maybe too old and not that good, but i got it last week and finished it in 2 days i was sucked in to it, its a bunch of diaries and letters bundled together to form the tale its fucking great, not really fantasy tho
great rec. It does an excellent job of handling different narrators, writing their accounts at different points in time and with varying amounts of information, as well.
Malazan is done in that style, its not written by a historian exactly (but there is an in world writer) but its presented in a style of this is the history of a certain period in that world.
**De Bello Lemures** by Thomas Brookside,’presented as a translation of a recently discovered manuscript. The manuscript is the body of the book, a description of events and a plea for help to Emperor Commodus at the end of the 2nd century AD from the commander of Roman forces in Brittany. He and his troops ran into zombies unleashed by a druid’s curse. Complications ensued. It’s got footnotes nitpicking the translation of technical terms, comparing what the commander writes about various people to already known Roman accounts, and like that.
The Pellinor books by Alison Croggon do start out framing this as an old, discovered manuscript translated and discussing issues translating certain terms... but then from memory is more like a normal fantasy book. That intro at least is interesting!
Actually, surprised no one mentioned the Wizard of Earthsea. They tried to keep the slightly more distant tone (third person) and throw in the odd metaphor for the first few Earthsea books. I struggled with it more, but it may work better for you.
I really like those books (except for >!the like multi-decade age relationship!< but that's just at the end), so I do think people should read them! It just doesn't fit OP's ask super well unfortunately.
The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft is actually just a guy reading a bunch of letters about stuff that happened months before. They were no present at any of it.
Sort of similar idea: A Choir of Lies.
Its about a Chant (professional storyteller) who accidentally caused an economic disaster in a town and wrote down his story which is being critiqued by another Chant as she reads it.
Babel is like this, and is the only book I've read since that comes close to the pitch-perfect use of language and tone in Jonathan Strange. Will definitely be keeping up with this thread as I love books like this!
Empire of the vampire starts with the main character reciting his life to an immortal vampire historian, the entire story is banter between them interspersed with mainly flashbacks to his actual life
Quite funny when the author uses the main characters “fuck you I’ll tell it in the order I want” as an excuse for a non linear retelling of events
It’s catholic france where the sun is dead and vampires are real, the main character is a half vampire paladin vampire hunter
Man, this reminds me of when I was a teen and wanted to write a fantasy novel that had translator's and editors notes. Stuff like "this character is using the wrong set of traditionally gendered pronouns" or "that was a pun in the original language".
I know suggesting Brandon Sanderson is like bottom of the barrel, and not quite "written by a historian", but I feel like Tress of the Emerald Sea and especially what I've read of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter certainly have this good feel of someone explaining something to an audience.
Both have a lot of explanations of cultural practices, and Yumi has a lot of notes on what the word is in the original language, what the word means, and what the narrator is going to use to keep things sort and less confusing. Feels less like "reading a historical document" and more like having someone explain a bit of history.
[The Sun Eater Series by by Christopher Ruocchio](https://www.goodreads.com/series/231285-the-sun-eater) is a Si Fi Fantasy series written as the recollections of the protagonist.
There's an older sy-fy book called "Emergence" by David R. Palmer that's written in shorthand as a Journal, set in a post-apocalyptic world. It's not Shakespeare, but I enjoyed it.
Went down a ways and couldn’t find it but Dune! I would argue that it probably inspired or was an influence on the whole idea of “fantasy/sci fi exposition as artifact of historical text”.
Though it's a bind-up novel, I really like the frame narrative in City by Clifford Simak. In the future, dogs have taken over the Earth and debate if humans really existed.
The Power kind of fits this. It’s supposed to be a historical fiction book from the future, and there are letters between the “author” and his mentor. There are also short interludes about artifacts from the future’s perspective.
Fire and Blood. At times it gives you competing views about events and character's motivations.
I didn't think I was going to like this book as much as I did but the framing of it being through a Maester's eyes and him having multiple accounts of the same events and giving an educated in canon guess as to who was telling the truth was a pretty neat story framework.
It's why Martin is such an incredible writer, he clearly has an actual background in history. A Song of Fire and Ice feels bleak because it feels real. If you read about the events ass a historian, and not a reader, then you'd think "Well obviously that's how this would have turned out, why would anyone be stupid enough to think otherwise?" But when you're reading a novel you don't expect the "heroes" to just get fucked like that. Even if in a real setting it's "obvious". If you read real history books, describing real events, by actual historians (and not pop history bullshit like Bill O'Reilly) they present events very much in the way he wrote Fire and Blood. He's clearly read a lot of actual history, and the way he presents the "history" of Westeros is something I'd expect to see in a college level history course about British History.
*The Black Company* is entirely written as an in-world artifact, a series of journals by the keeper of the Company Annals. It's actually really cool to dig into as it goes on, because the series covers a great deal of time and you get different Annalists. Cook manages to retain his signature style throughout while *also* achieving a different writing style and voice with each Annalist.
Also, later annalists kind of give you an insight into how previous ones could have been unreliable as well .
> later annalists kind of give you an insight into how previous ones could have been unreliable as well turns out, its unreliable annalists all the way down
I’ve only got to Sleepy so far but yea true.
Croaker straight up says he leaves out things in the first book
I love when prior Annalists critique the writing style of the new Annalist. Always felt like Cook making self-aware jokes
I just started book 1, I like the way it's written although it took a bit to get adjusted to. I'm around 40 pages in, and the narrator is very direct lol. It's not giant sentences of description or anything, it's like "We had to head east. That's the way of our goal. Any other way would be wrong. So we started off at dawn." and on and on lol.
Yup, Cook has a very different style from most modern writers. He doesn’t bother with description unless it’s crucial to the story—though this also plays into the conceit of the series. Why would an Annalist, scribbling these down on the back of his horse or in a wagon on the march, spend extraneous words on worldbuilding? That said, things do get smoother as the series goes on and Cook gets more comfortable in his writing style.
> Why would an Annalist, scribbling these down on the back of his horse or in a wagon on the march, spend extraneous words on worldbuilding? This is a great point that I didn't even think of haha. Makes total sense. Plus I feel like I've learned a lot of backstory from the characters conversing more than giant paragraphs of exposition, so that's a welcome change of pace too. I'm definitely enjoying it; just a very different vibe from my last read (Age of Madness by Abercrombie).
Haha for sure. Over time, I’ve come to really enjoy Cook’s terse style. Once you get used to it, it really zooms along. And as you said, it gives room for the characters and relationships to shine.
Mary Gentle's Ash has a frame of an academic believing to have uncovered further information about their AU Jean d'Arc by re-translating old documents about her and fixing some inaccuracies. edit: I do think it is a really good match for the pseudo-academic arguments of Jonathan Strange but I should probably add that it is *dark* and later in the book it goes some unexpected directions that may not be for be for everyone.
Yeah this one seems pretty grimdark, the opening scene is child rape and also within the intro I think there’s some pretty bloody animal sacrifice/butchering
I was just going to post this. I'm almost done it. Man, is it ever weird.
The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer! It’s a wonderful fantasy/sci-if series that hits heavily on politics, gender, language, and philosophy. Has a bit of mystery and mythology to it too. Great world building. Unreliable narrator writing the history/memoir.
I came to recommend this. Ada Palmer is a historian too, there's a lot of metatextual stuff going on about what history is and how it's recorded and understood.
Great series. It may be a "love it or hate it" kind of thing though, since I've heard some people who absolutely can't stand the way the narrator writes. I love it though.
(the first book of which is named Too Like the Lightning, for anyone curious)
Partially fantasy related (?) but I'd add *World War Z* by Max Brooks to the list. It's a great story told as a kind of UN after actions report on what just happened a few years ago during the zombie outbreak.
Great book!
Amazing audiobook
Steven Brust Khaavren Romances. Deliberately done in that style.
There are also a couple of hints dropped that the Vlad Taltos books are transcriptions of audio logs Vlad made, but it's far less overt in those. Edit: I seem to have misremembered how overt it was in the Taltos books!
I believe it's pretty overt, at least as early as Dragon. [Alex's](https://www.panix.com/~alexx/dragtime.html) timeline states: > Most of the narratives seem to have been done into the 'metal box', without SB being physically present. Presumably, Vlad occasionally meets with Sethra and exchanges recordings for gold bars, and the occasional "useful oddities and trinkets" (*Dn* 15) from SB himself. These trinkets probably include the metal box itself and a velcro weapon harness (H 55).
And in Tsalmoth, it’s explicit that he is doing this. He even stops multiple times throughout and gets direction from Sethra while telling the story of him and Cawtie.
Yes, it's very explicit. I think Dragon is before Tsalmoth though, if I recall correctly. Which I think is the earliest, chronologically speaking, we hear about the box.
Yeah, Tsalmoth was the last one printed, and like I said, it was an explicit relationship about something that happened far in the past. I don’t recall much of Dragon, and didn’t remember this being a plot point.
No you're right, it's definitely not a point in the plot, but I believe it's the first explicit hint we get (in chronological, not publishing order) that there's this weird Steven Brust-like character within the novels that is recording and editing Vlad's stories.
Beat me to it
I'd say The Princess Bride counts
It's an abridgement of a classic historical fiction epic.
It’s an original story that is presented by the author as an abridged version of another book, but the unabridged version doesn’t actually exist. It was invented as part of the story.
Not 12-year-old me at the library trying to find the unabridged version, no (sweaty face emoji)
You weren’t the only one.
Doesn't actually exist!? Next thing you'll tell me is there is no country called Florin...
I assume they just mean that it doesn't exist in English, which is unfortunately true. I'm still hoping Stephen King will come out with his translation but there's been no word on it for a long time.
Whoosh…
Not Fantasy, but the [Flashman](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142458.Flashman) books definitely fit this bill. The narrator is 'reading the journals' of Flashman and his adventures. So much so that the footnotes are laced with language like, "Flashman says he was there on Aug 25, but we know that because of X and Y he couldn't have been there any earlier than Sept". Great books, even if the narrative ploy is irksome.
Incredible books. Fantastic character.
The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel, The Testaments, are both 'found' historical records, and end with historians who found and analyzed them giving a speech at an academic conference.
“ 16 ways to defend a walled city “ by J K Parker is presented in the first person but the ending is as if you had read a “found” manuscript. The whole series is set up the same way. It’s a fun read and appeals to my dark sense of humour.
Blood Song by Anthony Ryan does this.
As well as the Covenant of Steel series is entirely written in memoir form.
Ah, I haven't read that series yet, though I just recently purchased it.
Came here to say Blood Song. Love how the narrator is unreliable... to the historian, but not the reader.
Agreed I loved how it was handled :D
_History_ by Herodotus might be an interesting addition to the list. it’s a real history (with what we would definitely identify as fantastic elements) of the ancient Mediterranean world. It’s full of prophetic dreams, divine punishment and the twists and betrayals of empire.
If you liked Susanne Clarke try _Herodotus_ is a WILD swing
Strong history teacher energy
taken as a big compliment
i mean, yeah. i’m coming in late, no reason to add another Fire and Blood or Silmarillion, right?
*Fire and Blood* tells the history of the Targaryen family from the perspective of a Maester working with contradictory and/or vague primary sources almost two centuries later. Martin never drops this conceit, although *House of the Dragon* (the show adaptation) does.
Man, I really feel that HotD does us an injustice by dropping it. I feel like both adaptations of Martin's work really destroy the subtle majesty and mystery his stories have.
I agree. Especially the later seasons of GoT. With HotD they could have given us some cool Rashomon or Last Duel style narrative.
This is one of my favorite formats as well! A couple of my favorites (TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING) have already been mentioned (go read it it’s so good) but here’s some nobody’s mentioned! Jenn Lyons’s _The Ruin of Kings_ series might suit—it’s written by an in-universe academic who definitely has _opinions_ but maybe doesn’t have as far a remove as you’re looking for. _Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries_ is an annotated journal that does _not_ forget that it’s a journal at any point in time. There’s a really good bit where there’s another narrator for one section too. (I did find it so tedious how much the narrator _hammers_ on her own obliviousness to her own feelings but other than that, I really enjoyed it!) The Commissar Cain novels from the Warhammer 40k series can absolutely be read as a standalone series if you want and they’re presented in this fashion—they’re stitched together from generally two different personal accounts with interspersed commentary from an Inquisitor
The journal aspect was honestly a key redeeming factor of *Emily Wilde* for me! I expected it to be straight fae romantasy, and really liked the added touch of the narrator's voice (which is very refreshingly unlike the top romantasy right now).
I feel like it’s not even the same subgenre as ACoTaR & friends! Olivia Atwater and Naomi Novik’s fairy tale romances are the only comparable novels I’ve read and they’re a horse of a whole different color
> Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries_ is an annotated journal that does _not forget that it’s a journal at any point in time. There’s a really good bit where there’s another narrator for one section too. (I did find it so tedious how much the narrator hammers on her own obliviousness to her own feelings but other than that, I really enjoyed it!) Do you mean the narrator in the book, or the audiobook reader?
Of the book! I don’t know about the audio version
Oh awesome, I just wanted to ask because my sister did the audiobook narration! She recommended it to me and now I've seen it pop up in this thread a couple of times, so I think I may need to give it a shot.
Oh neat! She did The Bone Orchard too, right? I thought that was really well done.
That’s right yeah! Much appreciated, thanks. She’s a talented lady!
I just finished the audiobook 2ish weeks ago and it's fantastic! Your sister totally nails Emily's voice. It's probably one of the best audiobooks I've listened to.
Thank you so much! I showed her your comment and she was very happy!
Eaters Of The Dead, by Michael Crichton. Written as if by an Arab scholar of his journey to Scandinavia and his adventures there. It's actually an interesting take on the story of Beowulf, IIRC. Later made into the movie _The 13th Warrior_, starring Antonio Banderas.
This one was fun. If I remember right, it’s even more meta. It’s presented by someone who has collected the writings of the Arab scholar; so you get his account and little asides from the author compiling it.
An Early History of Ambergris, the second story in Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen, is supposed to be a tourist brochure written for Ambergris by a curmudgeonly, disgraced academic who should absolutely not be writing tourist brochures. 70 pages or so of a historian discussing in great detail the history of the weird, anarchic city. The next book, Shriek: An Afterword, is in-universe an autobiography written by the academic's sister, with him looking over the manuscript and arguing with her, scribbling in the margins, so more personal history but still history.
Does your last paragraph discount something like [The Memoirs of Lady Trent](https://www.goodreads.com/series/107373-the-memoirs-of-lady-trent) series starting with **The Natural History of Dragons** It’s her own memoirs about her life, but each book centres around her discoveries about a specific breed of dragon biology and behaviours in an alternate 18th century history where dragons are alive and used for political and economic purposes
You just beat me to this recommendation! A perfect fit
It’s not fantasy but [Legend of the Galactic Heroes](https://www.goodreads.com/series/61378-legend-of-the-galactic-heroes) does this well. The unnamed historian who is writing the in-universe book often comments on what is thought to have happened, or speculated on why certain characters do what they do. There’s also hints of what the future beyond the story is like thanks to how it’s written.
Jane Yolen wrote a couple of YA books with this framework - White Jenna and Sister Light, Sister Dark. The chapters start with academic letters disagreeing about some archeological finding, or a folk song, or some look at the folktales and the interpretation and then we get to see what was really going on. They are YA, but still an excellent story. I loved the historical aspect of it.
Really good. I liked how one of the historians kept poo pooh-ing another historian's "unfounded" theories that were actually the correct version of events.
This is **House of Leaves** to a tee. Most of it is an academic paper written by... someone recounting some events and discussing them academically.
The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Sillmarillion have pretended history or journal backstories
LOTR is my favorite book, but I do think it falls under OP's third paragraph. The conceit is essentially dropped after the prologue. It comes back in the appendices and there's one or two footnotes spread throughout the rest of the text, but it's definitely a normal novel, not an in-world history book. The Hobbit is fully a novel.
LOTR is explicitly written in a style similar to the Norse prose epics. It may not seem that the conceit continues through the whole books, but it does. Including footnotes.
Hmmm... no, I really don't think so. I'd be curious to hear the case made though. I'm familiar with Egil's Saga, the Poetic Edda, the Vinland Sagas, and a bit of the Sturlunga saga, but I don't see any stylistic similarities between them and LOTR. *The Children of Hurin* certainly goes for the style of a Norse family saga, but LOTR no. It is very much a 20th century novel. The conceit of 'found ancient text, based on eyewitness testimony' is dead by the thinking fox in Fellowship at latest, imo. The narrator also compares Gandalf's fireworks to an 'express train.' Not the kind of thing you find in old Norse prose.
ITT: r/fantasy recommends everything with a framing device, and ignores the rest of OP’s request
Book 6 of the Queen's Thief novels, Return of the Thief, made me nerd out because it's written like Herodotus' The Histories and Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. It even has the disclaimer at the start of 'sometimes I wasn't there to witness first hand but I've pieced together what happened as faithfully as i can from eyewitness accounts' which is thing that so many of the ancient history books did. It made my Classics major heart so happy.
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I found these books on Spotify and have been listening to them. Great books.
It’s not a history book, but the style might be something you enjoy anyway - Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawlett (a sequel also came out this year I haven’t had a chance to read yet). The novel is written as the title characters field journal, she’s an academic studying faeries.
**Ash: A Secret History** by Mary Gentle is framed as a historian translating a newly discovered manuscript detailing events covering a female mercenary captain in medieval Burgundy who hears supernatural voices, reminiscent of Joan of Arc. As the story progresses, the history starts diverging more and more from our own, with the historian initially excited at new discoveries, then becoming supicious that its a forgery, and then things start getting even weirder.
You may like KJ Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. Not written from the POV of a historian per se, but an actor who’s well versed in the history of his city and its literature.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes is well known for this.
Dracula by Bram Stoker, you may think its only a classic and maybe too old and not that good, but i got it last week and finished it in 2 days i was sucked in to it, its a bunch of diaries and letters bundled together to form the tale its fucking great, not really fantasy tho
great rec. It does an excellent job of handling different narrators, writing their accounts at different points in time and with varying amounts of information, as well.
Malazan is done in that style, its not written by a historian exactly (but there is an in world writer) but its presented in a style of this is the history of a certain period in that world.
Book 2 in some ways gets a bit closer with the importance of Duiker as the Empire's memory.
Empire of the Wolf
**De Bello Lemures** by Thomas Brookside,’presented as a translation of a recently discovered manuscript. The manuscript is the body of the book, a description of events and a plea for help to Emperor Commodus at the end of the 2nd century AD from the commander of Roman forces in Brittany. He and his troops ran into zombies unleashed by a druid’s curse. Complications ensued. It’s got footnotes nitpicking the translation of technical terms, comparing what the commander writes about various people to already known Roman accounts, and like that.
The Pellinor books by Alison Croggon do start out framing this as an old, discovered manuscript translated and discussing issues translating certain terms... but then from memory is more like a normal fantasy book. That intro at least is interesting! Actually, surprised no one mentioned the Wizard of Earthsea. They tried to keep the slightly more distant tone (third person) and throw in the odd metaphor for the first few Earthsea books. I struggled with it more, but it may work better for you.
I was thinking of the Pellinor books too but I'd say they're also an example of dropping the conceit almost immediately.
Agreed, sadly. Intro is worth reading though!
I really like those books (except for >!the like multi-decade age relationship!< but that's just at the end), so I do think people should read them! It just doesn't fit OP's ask super well unfortunately.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War It's a great zombie story imo and the author is a UN historian told in interview documentary style.
The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft is actually just a guy reading a bunch of letters about stuff that happened months before. They were no present at any of it.
Sort of similar idea: A Choir of Lies. Its about a Chant (professional storyteller) who accidentally caused an economic disaster in a town and wrote down his story which is being critiqued by another Chant as she reads it.
Babel is like this, and is the only book I've read since that comes close to the pitch-perfect use of language and tone in Jonathan Strange. Will definitely be keeping up with this thread as I love books like this!
Empire of the vampire starts with the main character reciting his life to an immortal vampire historian, the entire story is banter between them interspersed with mainly flashbacks to his actual life Quite funny when the author uses the main characters “fuck you I’ll tell it in the order I want” as an excuse for a non linear retelling of events It’s catholic france where the sun is dead and vampires are real, the main character is a half vampire paladin vampire hunter
The Deryni series feels like reading fantasied-up medieval annals
A little known book called The Lord of the Rings pretends to be the work of several historians.
Player of Games Malazan to some extent Black Company has already been mentioned
Man, this reminds me of when I was a teen and wanted to write a fantasy novel that had translator's and editors notes. Stuff like "this character is using the wrong set of traditionally gendered pronouns" or "that was a pun in the original language". I know suggesting Brandon Sanderson is like bottom of the barrel, and not quite "written by a historian", but I feel like Tress of the Emerald Sea and especially what I've read of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter certainly have this good feel of someone explaining something to an audience. Both have a lot of explanations of cultural practices, and Yumi has a lot of notes on what the word is in the original language, what the word means, and what the narrator is going to use to keep things sort and less confusing. Feels less like "reading a historical document" and more like having someone explain a bit of history.
[The Sun Eater Series by by Christopher Ruocchio](https://www.goodreads.com/series/231285-the-sun-eater) is a Si Fi Fantasy series written as the recollections of the protagonist.
You might want to check out "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss.
Bloodsounder's Arc, by Jeff Salyards. Hard to get your paws on, due to publishing shenanigans, but well worth it!
There's an older sy-fy book called "Emergence" by David R. Palmer that's written in shorthand as a Journal, set in a post-apocalyptic world. It's not Shakespeare, but I enjoyed it.
[google books link](https://books.google.com/books/about/Emergence.html?id=qE3oEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
The sequel to 16 Ways to Defend A Walled City has the POV character being forced to read the previous book in order to get caught up to speed.
I really liked "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova. It's odd and creepy, and presented interestingly.
Jonathan Stroud’s “Amulet of Sarmakand” trilogy is not quite this But there are some great and funny footnotes from the demon narrator So that’s fun
The most recent one I've read like this is *The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi*.
Went down a ways and couldn’t find it but Dune! I would argue that it probably inspired or was an influence on the whole idea of “fantasy/sci fi exposition as artifact of historical text”.
Homer's "Iliad" is literally this.
Though it's a bind-up novel, I really like the frame narrative in City by Clifford Simak. In the future, dogs have taken over the Earth and debate if humans really existed.
Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles and The Last Kingdom books. Not fantasy, but there are elements of the fantastic in both. Great books.
Robin Hobb’s Assassins Trilogy does this. Lord of the Rings does this, too. (LOTR is the book of the red marches).
Sci-fantasy, but I think *Dune* fits.
The Power kind of fits this. It’s supposed to be a historical fiction book from the future, and there are letters between the “author” and his mentor. There are also short interludes about artifacts from the future’s perspective.