Best Fantasy Books

Essun searches for her daughter while learning to control the obelisks — floating crystals that could either save or destroy the world — in the second Hugo Award-winning volume of the Broken Earth trilogy.

Carter and Sadie face the final battle: Apophis is about to rise and consume the sun itself. They must bring Ra back at full power and deploy a shadow magic that has never successfully worked — while their entire network of nome magicians faces obliteration. The Kane Chronicles comes to its conclusion.

Loki is free and racing to launch Naglfar, the ship of the dead, to bring about Ragnarok. Magnus Chase and his crew set sail to stop him in Rick Riordan's rousing Norse finale, a voyage of flyting battles, hard goodbyes, and earned triumph.

Will Parry crosses into a world with a city called Cittagazze and encounters Lyra Belacqua. He finds the Subtle Knife — a blade that can cut windows between worlds. The middle volume of His Dark Materials expands the multiverse and introduces the concept of Dust as a contested force between science and religion.

Nomad is a man who can never stop moving — on a world where the sun kills everything it touches, and the only survival is to keep ahead of the terminator line. When he's drawn into the struggles of the planet's oppressed population, stopping means death, but abandoning them feels like its own kind of dying.

A homeless Boston teen dies on his sixteenth birthday and wakes in a Norse afterlife of warriors and doomed gods. Rick Riordan trades Olympus for Asgard in a fast, funny adventure that reinvents Viking myth for a new generation of readers.

Apollo and Meg return to New York for a final reckoning with Nero and the snake-god Python. Rick Riordan closes The Trials of Apollo, and a decade of Camp Half-Blood adventures, with a finale of courage, humor, and a god's hard-won understanding of mortality.

Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching, armed with a frying pan and ferocious common sense, ventures into Fairyland to rescue her stolen brother. Her only allies are the Nac Mac Feegle — tiny, blue, drunken, sword-swinging pictsies. The first Tiffany Aching adventure and a Discworld gateway for all ages.

With the Lord Ruler dead, Elend Venture struggles to hold together a fragile new government while Vin faces threats from within and without — and begins to question the prophecy that supposedly guides them.

A clockmaker is commissioned to build a perfect clock that would stop time, bringing the Auditors of Reality one step closer to a universe without the messy unpredictability of life. The History Monks dispatch Lu-Tze, a sweeper with a formidable past, and his new apprentice Lobsang Ludd to prevent it. Death's granddaughter Susan is also involved.

A dwarf demagogue is murdered as Ankh-Morpork's dwarfs and trolls edge toward riot over an ancient battle. Commander Vimes must solve the killing before the city explodes — and he must, no matter what, be home by six to read his son Where's My Cow? A late Watch masterpiece.

Wallace Price was a ruthless lawyer who worked himself to death. Now he is a ghost, refusing to cross over, being escorted to a tea shop in a small town where a ferryman named Hugo helps the dead accept their deaths. Under the Whispering Door is about learning, too late and then not too late, what makes a life worth living.

Five years after Vicious, Victor Vale is still evading capture and hunting Eli, while a new ExtraOrdinary named Marcella Riggins rises with destruction at her fingertips and an agenda of her own. Three storylines converge in Schwab's expansion of the Villains universe — a world where everyone with powers has reasons to use them.

Victor Vale and Eli Ever were college roommates and best friends — until their thesis research on near-death experiences led them to discover how to grant humans extraordinary powers. Ten years later, Victor has escaped from prison with one goal: to find the man who put him there and kill him. A superhero story told from the villain's perspective.

The Vega twins return to Zodiac Academy for their second semester — and the Heirs' campaign to break them intensifies even as unexpected alliances and undeniable attractions begin to complicate everything.

In the aftermath of Dumai's Wells, Rand hunts the Forsaken Sammael in Illian while Mat and Elayne seek the Bowl of the Winds in Ebou Dar. The series' political complexity deepens as the Dragon Reborn's actions reshape nations.

Fat Charlie Nancy has always been mortified by his embarrassing father — who turns out to have been Anansi, the African spider god of stories. When Charlie's estranged brother Spider shows up after their father's death, the deity's mischief-making powers come with him, and Charlie's ordinary life is invaded by mythology, magic, and consequences.

The first full Witcher novel follows Geralt raising and training Ciri after the fall of Cintra, while war engulfs the continent and powerful forces move to claim the girl of prophecy. The first book of the Witcher Saga proper.

Anthony Ryan's acclaimed epic fantasy debut, first book of Raven's Shadow. Given up by his father to the warrior monks of the Sixth Order, Vaelin Al Sorna is forged into a deadly fighter and a reluctant instrument of his realm — in a gripping coming-of-age tale framed by the legend he will become.

Across five centuries, three women refuse to stay dead. V.E. Schwab weaves the lives of three queer vampires — from sixteenth-century Spain to modern London — into a hungry, sweeping novel about appetite, freedom, and the long shadow of an immortal life.

Rysn Ftori, a disabled Thaylen merchant and newly appointed Wandersail captain, leads an expedition to the lost island of Aimia — and discovers something there that carries implications for the entire Cosmere.

The Reckoners take their fight to Babylon Restored — the flooded ruins of Manhattan — pursuing the Epic known as Regalia while David confronts the possibility that not all Epics are irredeemably corrupt.

Harry Dresden and his Knight of the Cross ally Michael Carpenter investigate a surge of violent ghost activity across Chicago — and receive an invitation to a vampire court ball that no one survives.

Prince Yarvi was born with a crippled hand — he would never be the warrior his culture demands. He plans to be a minister instead. Then his father and brother are murdered, and Yarvi is forced onto a throne he doesn't want, sworn to revenge he doesn't know how to take — before being betrayed, enslaved, and left for dead.