Best Fantasy Books

Set eight years after The Queen of Nothing, a new protagonist — Oak, the young prince of Elfhame — ventures into the north to recover a kidnapped human girl. What he finds is Suren, the former Queen of the Unseelie Court, living as an exile with a power she cannot control. A new duology in the Elfhame world begins.

In Verity, violence creates monsters — literally. Kate Harker is the ruthless daughter of the man who runs half the city by selling monster protection. August Flynn is a Sunai, a monster who feeds on souls — and who desperately wants to be human. When they become unlikely allies, the line between predator and prey disappears.

In the aftermath of the Red Wedding and the fall of King's Landing, power vacuums open across Westeros. Cersei Lannister consolidates control in the capital, Brienne of Tarth searches for the Stark girls, and Arya begins her training with the Faceless Men in Braavos — while the Iron Islands hold a kingsmoot that will reshape the shape of the war.

Poppy has been taken captive and must survive with Hawke — revealed as Hawke Flynn, a Prince and not the Royal Guard she believed him to be. With truths unravelling around her, Poppy must decide who to trust in a kingdom that has kept her blind.

On a far-future moon where humanity has retreated to let nature reclaim the continent, a tea monk named Dex leaves their comfortable life seeking something they can't name. In the wilderness, they encounter Mosscap — a robot who wants to understand what humans need. A Hugo Award-winning novella of gentle philosophy.

Charles Wallace, now fifteen, travels through time on the back of the unicorn Gaudior to change the course of history and prevent a nuclear war, while Meg participates from a distance through kything — a form of telepathic sharing.

Jace has disappeared — taken and bound to Sebastian Morgenstern — and Clary must go undercover to find him, pretending to join Sebastian while searching for a way to free Jace from the demonic tie that controls him. The stakes are higher than ever as Sebastian prepares to raise an army.

Will, an orphan boy at Castle Redmont who dreams of becoming a knight, is instead chosen as apprentice to Halt — the kingdom's most enigmatic and skilled Ranger — and must develop the arts of stealth, archery, and tracking to help face a rising evil threatening the kingdom.

Alina Starkov is on the run from the Darkling — the powerful Grisha commander who wants to use her light-summoning abilities to control all of Ravka. Seeking safety at sea, she instead discovers a new amplifier and a privateer named Sturmhond whose motives are far more complicated than they appear.

The conclusion of the Atlas trilogy: the Alexandrians must face the full consequences of the choices they made across the first two books, with the fate of the Society — and the world's accumulated knowledge — in the balance. Blake resolves the question of who among the six can be trusted and at what cost.

The first Discworld novel follows the hapless failed wizard Rincewind and the naive tourist Twoflower across a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant star turtle — a comic masterpiece that parodies epic fantasy.

Quentin Coldwater is now a king of Fillory, but restlessness drives him on a quest that leads back to Earth — while Julia's parallel story reveals how she gained her devastating magical power outside the Brakebills system. The most emotionally sophisticated volume in the Magicians trilogy.

Rand's military campaign through the Westlands takes a dark turn as the One Power begins to behave strangely around him, while Egwene al'Vere leads the rebel Aes Sedai in an audacious campaign to reclaim the White Tower from Elaida.

Locke and Jean are coerced by the Bondsmagi into rigging an election in Karthain — and Locke discovers his opponent is Sabetha, the one woman he has always loved and never quite managed to win.

A graduate student discovers a mysterious book in his university library that contains a story about his own childhood — and is drawn through it into an underground world of stories, doors, and a sea that smells of honey and blood.

Sixteen-year-old Kaye has spent her childhood moving between cities while her mother plays small venues. Returning to New Jersey, she discovers the faerie world she glimpsed as a child is real — and she is more entangled in its politics than she ever knew. Dark, seductive, and morally complicated, Tithe established the template for Holly Black's faerie fiction.

Rand attempts a desperate and unprecedented gambit to cleanse saidin — the male half of the One Power — of the Dark One's taint, while Mat is trapped in Ebou Dar under Seanchan occupation and Perrin searches for his captured wife.

Meg Murry must journey inside her brother Charles Wallace's cells to battle a cosmic evil called the Echthroi, accompanied by a Teacher named Blajeny and a strange creature called Proginoskes, in a quest that turns on the power of naming and love.

The Mortal War is over, but Clary and Jace's happiness is short-lived. Someone is murdering Shadowhunters and turning their bodies into weapons. As Jace struggles with dark visions that threaten his relationship with Clary, a new and terrifying enemy emerges — one whose connection to Valentine's legacy runs deeper than anyone suspected.

The Cinderella story retold from the perspective of Iris, one of the stepsisters — set in seventeenth-century Haarlem among Dutch painters and tulip merchants, asking who is really the beautiful one and what beauty costs.

The first Rain Wild Chronicles novel follows the misfits assigned to tend a group of deformed dragons — creatures that hatched wrong and cannot fly — as they journey upriver to find the lost Elderling city of Kelsingra. A new entry point to the Realm of the Elderlings set after the events of the Liveship Traders.

Harry Dresden investigates a series of brutal murders during the full moon — and discovers that werewolves in Chicago are far more complicated than folklore suggests.

In a brutal, medieval village far from the Giver's Community, the orphaned girl Kira is spared from abandonment because of her gift for embroidery, and is put to work restoring the Robe that tells her people's history.

Sandy and Dennys Murry — the 'normal' twins — accidentally travel back to biblical times, to the era just before Noah's flood, where they encounter nephilim, seraphim, and Noah's family in a story about choice, mortality, and the nature of good and evil.