Books like Vows of Empire by Emily Skrutskie

Six of Crows is a fantasy novel in the Grishaverse that follows a crew of thieves in the city of Ketterdam, a Dutch‑inspired port, told through the third‑person viewpoints of seven characters.

Rin, a war‑orphaned girl from Rooster Province, passes the empirewide Keju test and gains entry to Sinegard, the elite military academy of the Nikara Empire. There she discovers potent shamanic powers that may alter the course of an impending war.

In eighteenth‑century Cairo, Nahri, a street‑smart con artist, discovers she is the last of a line of djinn healers and is drawn into the luxurious, politically fraught city of Daevabad, where her powers could prevent a kingdom‑wide war.

In a world where magic once pulsed through every stone, children of Orïsha fight to reclaim their heritage after a tyrant extinguishes their powers and their people’s hope.

Laia, a Scholar, infiltrates the Martial Empire’s elite military academy as a slave after her brother is jailed for treason, aided by rebel Scholars who promise to save him.

In Paris 1889, treasure hunter Séverin Montagnet‑Alarie is drawn into a quest by the secretive Order of Babel. Together with a diverse group—a debt‑bound engineer, a banished historian, a dancer haunted by the past—they pursue an ancient artifact that could reshape history.

Seventeenth‑summer Brienna of Valenia must choose between passion and blood when a disgraced lord’s patronage entangles her in a plot to overthrow a rival king and restore the rightful queen to the northern throne.

Elisabeth, a foundling raised among whispering grimoires in Austermeer’s Great Libraries, believes all sorcerers are evil and vows to become a warden to guard the kingdom from the ink‑and‑leather monsters that spring to life when sorcery is provoked.

"The life and works of Seneca pose a number of fascinating challenges. For one thing, how can we reconcile the bloody, passionate tragedies, with the prose works advocating a life of Stoic tranquility? An even more challenging question is, how are we to reconcile Seneca the Stoic philosopher, the man of principle, who advocated a life of calm and simplicity, with Seneca the man of the moment, who amassed a vast personal fortune in the service of an emperor seen by many, at the time and afterwards, as an insane tyrant? In this biography, Emily Wilson will present Seneca as a man under enormous pressure, struggling for compromise in a world of absolutism. His work and his life both show, in fascinating ways, the fissures and cracks created by the clash of the ideal and the real: the gulf between political hopes and fears, and philosophical ideals; the gap between what we want to be, and what we are. The book will assume no prior knowledge either of ancient Roman society, Stoicism, Seneca's life or work, but will weave these features together into a lively narrative, while presenting new insights into an author whose reputation is currently experiencing a revival within the academy"--