Books like The Priory of the Orange Tree

R.F. Kuang takes the scope and political complexity of Priory and compresses it into a tighter, more brutal package. Rin rises from poverty to attend a military academy, discovers she can channel the power of a phoenix god, and watches her world collapse into war.

Shannon and Kuang share an interest in how myths become weapons: in Priory, the Nameless One is both genuine threat and political tool. In The Poppy War, the gods are real but the humans who channel them pay with their minds. Both authors draw from real-world history and mythology rather than recycling Western European templates, with Kuang building from Chinese history and Shannon weaving together influences from across the globe. Kuang's prose is blunter than Shannon's, more concerned with visceral impact than atmospheric description.

Rin's character arc goes darker than anything in Priory, pushing past heroism into territory where the line between savior and monster disappears. The trilogy format lets Kuang track consequences across years, showing what happens after the war ends and the hero has to live with what she did. If Priory's scale and its willingness to center non-Western cultures spoke to you, The Poppy War delivers the same ambition with sharper teeth.

Rebecca Yarros puts Violet Sorrengail into a war college where students bond with dragons or die trying. The dragon-rider element connects directly to Priory's Tane chapters, where the bond between rider and dragon carries weight that goes beyond combat utility. Yarros writes the Riders Quadrant as a survival gauntlet where alliances shift daily and the weak get killed, a pressure-cooker environment that produces characters hardened enough to handle what comes next.

Violet enters the college physically fragile compared to her classmates, forced to compensate with strategy and stubbornness in a dynamic that echoes Ead's position as an outsider maintaining a secret identity in hostile territory. The dragon bonding in Fourth Wing operates on mutual choice, giving the dragons agency in a way that mirrors Shannon's treatment of Tane's relationship with her dragon. Yarros leans harder into romance than Shannon does, building a central relationship with enemies-to-allies intensity that dominates the book's emotional core.

The worldbuilding expands across the series to reveal political conspiracies and military threats that match Priory's continental scale. Readers who wanted more dragon-and-rider content after Priory will find it here in abundance.

Naomi Novik sets Uprooted in a valley on the edge of a corrupted forest, where a wizard known as the Dragon takes a village girl every ten years. Agnieszka, the girl nobody expected him to choose, discovers she has magic of her own, wild and instinctive in contrast to the Dragon's precise, academic style. The fairy-tale structure shares DNA with Priory's mythological framework, where ancient stories about heroes and monsters turn out to be literally true.

Novik draws from Polish folklore the way Shannon draws from global traditions, grounding the fantasy in a specific cultural texture rather than generic medievalism. The Wood itself functions like Priory's Nameless One: an ancient, patient evil that corrupts everything it touches. The relationship between Agnieszka and the Dragon starts antagonistic and builds through shared danger, their contrasting magical styles forcing them to find common ground.

Novik writes magic with sensory detail, making you feel the difference between Agnieszka's organic, root-and-soil approach and the Dragon's crystalline precision. The standalone format matches Priory's, delivering a complete arc in a single volume without sequel-baiting. Readers who loved how Shannon wove myth into the fabric of reality will find Novik doing the same with Eastern European traditions.

Tamsyn Muir builds the Locked Tomb series on a foundation so strange it should not work: necromancers serving a god-emperor across nine planetary houses, with a sword-and-sorcery structure wrapped in science fiction. Gideon Nav, a sword-wielding orphan forced to serve as cavalier to her childhood enemy Harrowhark, navigates a crumbling space palace where necromancers are dying in increasingly creative ways. The tonal mismatch is the point.

Muir writes with an irreverence that Shannon does not share, but both authors center queer women in epic narratives without making their queerness the conflict. The worldbuilding is as dense as Priory's, though Muir reveals it through fragments and jokes rather than exposition. The necromantic magic system has strict, inventive rules that reward close reading, much like Shannon's treatment of magefire and wyrm sigils.

Muir's plotting hides layers beneath layers, and rereading reveals how carefully she planted information in seemingly throwaway lines. The series spans four books that shift in tone and structure from mystery to psychological horror to war epic. If you want the queer representation and genre ambition of Priory pushed into weirder, darker territory, the Locked Tomb delivers exactly that.

Naomi Novik takes the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale and rebuilds it as a survival story set in a Lithuanian-inspired medieval world. Miryem, a moneylender's daughter, turns her family's debts into silver and her silver into gold, drawing the attention of the Staryk king from a frozen otherworld. The novel weaves three women's perspectives together as they each fight for survival and agency within systems that treat them as property.

Shannon and Novik share an interest in women who claim power in worlds designed to deny them any. Where Priory gives its female characters swords and political authority, Spinning Silver gives them financial acumen, domestic labor, and sheer determination. The magic operates on fairy-tale logic, where promises have literal power and transformation follows rules as old as storytelling itself.

Novik draws from Jewish and Eastern European traditions, building a world that feels specific and grounded in the same way Shannon's multi-cultural setting does. The three narrative threads braid together into a climax where each woman's choices affect the others, creating an interconnected structure that mirrors Priory's multi-POV approach across continents.

S.A. Chakraborty sets The City of Brass in the hidden city of Daevabad, where djinn tribes have feuded for centuries under a power structure enforced through blood purity laws. Nahri, a Cairo street hustler who accidentally summons a warrior djinn, gets pulled into a political world as layered and dangerous as anything in Priory.

Chakraborty draws from Islamic mythology and Middle Eastern history with the same depth Shannon brings to her global influences, building a world where religion, magic, and politics are inseparable. Daevabad itself functions like Shannon's Inys or Tane's Seiiki: a fully realized place with its own architecture, social customs, and centuries of accumulated grievance. The magic system ties to elemental affinities and tribal bloodlines, creating the same sense of inherited power and inherited responsibility that runs through Priory. Nahri shares Ead's position as an outsider with hidden abilities navigating a court where everyone has an agenda.

Chakraborty writes political maneuvering with the same patience Shannon brings to her court chapters, building alliances and betrayals across hundreds of pages. The Daevabad Trilogy completes in three books, delivering a full political arc from revolution through governance.

Katherine Arden sets The Bear and the Nightingale in medieval Russia, where Vasilisa Petrovna grows up in a remote village at the edge of a wilderness populated by household spirits and forest demons from Slavic folklore. As Christianity spreads through the region, the old spirits weaken, and something far worse stirs in the woods. Arden draws from Russian fairy tales the way Shannon draws from global mythology, treating folk traditions not as decoration but as the structural foundation of her magic system.

Vasya can see and speak to the spirits that most adults have forgotten, giving her a connection to the old world that mirrors Ead's hidden magefire abilities in Priory. The tension between the old pagan traditions and the new Christian faith drives the novel's central conflict, creating a cultural clash as sharp as anything in Shannon's multi-faith world. Arden writes winter with a physical intensity that makes you feel the cold, building atmosphere through specific sensory detail.

Vasya's refusal to fit the roles her society assigns to women drives the plot with the same quiet fury that powers Priory's feminist core. The Winternight Trilogy expands from this intimate beginning into a narrative that reaches the courts of Moscow.

Samantha Shannon returns to the world of The Priory of the Orange Tree in this standalone companion set five centuries earlier, during an age when the wyrms wake from their long sleep and threaten every kingdom at once. The book follows four people, chief among them a Priory sister who has trained her whole life for an enemy that never came, a young royal in the frozen North, and a temple-raised woman in the East who wants to rouse sleeping dragon gods.

Shannon writes the same wide, patient scope readers loved the first time, moving between matriarchal orders, dragon lore, and quiet human love across a burning continent. Reading order does not matter, so Priory fans can pick this up next with no fear of spoilers.

For anyone who closed Priory wishing the world were bigger, this is the obvious next stop, and it may be the better book.

Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun is the pick for Priory readers who came for women taking thrones that were never meant for them. Set in a fantastical version of fourteenth-century China under Mongol rule, it follows a peasant girl who steals her dead brother's name and his prophesied fate of greatness, then refuses to let anything stop her from claiming it.

Parker-Chan writes ambition as a raw, gender-bending force, and the book treats the question of who gets to hold power with the same seriousness Shannon brings to her matriarchal orders. The magic is spare, the politics are dense, and the queer longing at the center is drawn with real ache.

This is grounded historical fantasy rather than dragon epic, but the feeling of a woman rewriting the rules of her world carries straight over. A fierce, elegant, award-winning read.

Madeline Miller's Circe is the quieter, more intimate cousin of Priory's feminist heart, trading a continent-spanning war for the long life of one woman finding her strength. Told in the voice of the witch of Greek myth, the book follows a minor goddess who is scorned by her divine family, exiled to a lonely island, and left to discover what she can build with her own hands and her own magic.

Miller writes with the kind of golden, sensory prose that makes centuries feel like an afternoon, and the story turns a footnote of the Odyssey into a full portrait of a woman who refuses to be small. Priory readers drawn to Ead and Sabran's slow claiming of agency will find the same current here, distilled into a single unforgettable life.

It is a book about mothers, monsters, and the price of independence.

K. Arsenault Rivera's The Tiger's Daughter is the sapphic epic Priory readers keep hoping to stumble onto, built on a love story between two warrior women that spans an entire continent. Drawing on Mongolian and imperial Japanese influences, it follows an empress-to-be and a nomadic archer bound since childhood, whose bond becomes the axis of a fight against a rising demonic blight infecting their world.

Rivera frames much of the tale as a long letter from one lover to the other, so the grand battles and sprawling geography always come back to a single fierce devotion. The prose leans lush and unhurried, and the central relationship gets the full weight of the page in a way Priory fans will know at once. A hidden gem because it launched quietly and never caught the buzz its ambition deserved.

For readers who want the romance dialed up and the world just as wide.

R.J. Barker's The Bone Ships is the salt-sprayed answer for Priory readers who want dragons and a world where women hold the power.

The islands of this setting are ruled by a matriarchy, warships are carved from the bones of long-dead sea dragons, and the story kicks off when a living dragon surfaces for the first time in generations. A drunk former officer and the iron-willed woman who takes command of his condemned ship are ordered to protect the creature rather than hunt it, a choice that upends everything their society is built on. Barker writes a strange, fully realized world with its own language and customs, then fills it with the kind of ragtag crew loyalty that makes a long voyage fly by.

A hidden gem lost in the crowded epic-fantasy shelf. For anyone who wants their dragons oceanic and their captain unforgettable.

C.S.E.

Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter is the World Fantasy Award winner Priory readers should not have missed, a fat, gorgeously strange standalone about a young woman coming into a very unusual gift. Born into a family of crown-appointed killers, the heroine has a talent for necromancy paired with an allergy to violence so severe that cruelty makes her physically ill. When her deadly parents die and leave her a mountain of debt, she has to navigate schemers, revenants, and her own dangerous magic while staying true to a gentleness her bloodline despises.

Cooney writes with a maximalist, footnote-dotted glee that makes the whole world feel overstuffed with wonder, and the queer relationships get room to breathe. A hidden gem buried under flashier releases the year it arrived. For readers who want the standalone heft of Priory in a register that is darker, funnier, and wholly its own.

S. L. Huang's The Water Outlaws, released in 2023, is the furiously feminist epic that Priory readers hungry for a big queer ensemble will tear through.

It reworks a classic Chinese tale into a story of a martial arts instructor who is framed, branded a criminal, and swept up into a band of mountain outlaws who fight for the women and the downtrodden a corrupt empire wants erased. Huang fills the book with a mostly female and queer cast, brutal and beautiful fight choreography, and a real argument about justice underneath the swordplay. The scope is broad, the politics bite, and the sense of women seizing space in a world that would rather cage them rhymes directly with Shannon's matriarchal orders.

Released to strong reviews and a spot on year-end lists, it is a standalone that reads with the momentum of a rebellion. For readers who want feminist fury with a sharper edge.

T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes to Call, released in 2024, is the tighter, more intimate feminist fantasy for Priory readers who love watching women dismantle the men and monsters who would rule them. Reworking the Brothers Grimm tale of the Goose Girl, it follows a sheltered girl whose mother is a cold, controlling sorceress, and the older woman who sees exactly what is happening and refuses to look away.

Kingfisher builds the story around the bond between generations of women and the slow, careful work of resisting an abuser with real power, giving her middle-aged heroine as much steel and heart as the young one. Where Priory paints its feminism across a whole continent, this one draws it inside a single haunted household, but the current of women protecting women runs just as strong. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy.

For readers who want their feminist fantasy sharp, gothic, and warm.