City of Stairs
World Fantasy Award nominee 2015.
An atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city - from one of America's most acclaimed young SF writers.
The city of Bulikov once wielded the powers of the gods to conquer the world, enslaving and brutalizing millions — until its divine protectors were killed. Now Bulikov has become just another colonial outpost of the world's new geopolitical power, but the surreal landscape of the city itself — first shaped, now shattered, by the thousands of miracles its guardians once worked upon it — stands as a constant, haunting reminder of its former supremacy.
Into this broken city steps Shara Thivani. Officially, the unassuming young woman is just another junior diplomat sent by Bulikov's oppressors. Unofficially, she is one of her country's most accomplished spies, dispatched to catch a murderer. But as Shara pursues the killer, she starts to suspect that the beings who ruled this terrible place may not be as dead as they seem — and that Bulikov's cruel reign may not yet be over.
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Robert Jackson Bennett
In the shifting terrain of modern fantasy, Robert Jackson Bennett stands out not for the worlds he builds, but for the questions he refuses to let go unanswered. His stories don’t just transport readers—they confront them. What if gods could die, and their corpses still held sway over history? What if magic were reduced to a language—a programming code etched into reality—and power came from those who knew how to rewrite the rules?
Born in 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and raised in the outskirts of Houston, Bennett grew up roaming the in-between spaces—construction sites, empty fields, drainage ditches. Places where things were half-finished or half-forgotten. That sense of the liminal—the not-quite-here, not-quite-normal—echoes in everything he writes. He later studied English at the University of Texas at Austin, but it wasn’t academia that shaped his narrative instincts—it was curiosity, the kind that turns over every rock just to see what’s writhing beneath.
The Divine Cities
The Divine Cities consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
