If you were drawn to Vaelin’s years of harsh schooling, the brotherhood he forges in the Sixth Order, and the way each trial chisels him into a legend, you’ll love how The Name of the Wind follows Kvothe from desperate boy to formidable student. Like Vaelin’s knife-edge tests and missions, Kvothe’s ordeals at the University—and beyond—forge skill, notoriety, and myth, all told with the immediacy of lived experience.

Much as Vaelin narrates his past to a royal historian, The Black Company is told by Croaker, the mercenary company’s annalist, who records brutal campaigns and the moral costs of survival. If you liked the way Vaelin’s first-person recollections—with those sharp interludes from the court scribe—pull you straight into the mud and blood of war, Croaker’s plainspoken journals will hit the same vein.

If the ambushes, duels, and hard choices that shadow Vaelin’s path kept you glued to the page—especially the way loyalty and violence tangle around the Orders and the crown—The Blade Itself offers that same iron-and-gristle pull. Abercrombie’s Logen Ninefingers and Sand dan Glokta wade through knife fights, political backstabbing, and grim reckonings that echo the harsh tone of Vaelin’s campaigns.

If King Janus’s long game—covert missions, strategic marriages, and statecraft that drafts the Sixth Order as tools—hooked you, The Traitor Baru Cormorant dives even deeper. Like Vaelin navigating royal agendas and secret directives, Baru must master finance, espionage, and policy to outplay an empire from within, where every alliance cuts and every victory exacts a hidden price.

If you were compelled by how Vaelin can be both savior and instrument—carrying out assassinations for crown and country while questioning what those orders mean—Prince of Thorns places you inside the head of another dangerous, magnetic figure. Jorg Ancrath’s ruthless pursuit of power forces the same hard look at justice, vengeance, and the thin line between necessary violence and outright cruelty.