Best Fantasy Books

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.

A dying wizard hands his staff to an eighth son of an eighth son who turns out to be a daughter. Esk's path to the all-male Unseen University drags Granny Weatherwax into the wider world for the first time, and Discworld's sharpest witch is born.

An orphan who can see the dead is summoned to a crumbling family estate where a wall divides the living world from a hungry shadow realm. V.E. Schwab crafts a hauntingly atmospheric gothic fantasy about belonging, grief, and the things that wait behind locked doors.

The conclusion of the Shattered Sea trilogy. As the High King's power threatens to crush the lands around the Shattered Sea, a young princess, a cunning minister, and the series' returning heroes are drawn into a war that will demand terrible compromises to win.

Alex Stern is done waiting. To rescue Darlington from hell, she'll break every rule of the secret societies that govern her. Leigh Bardugo's second Alex Stern novel plunges deeper into Yale's occult underworld with a descent-into-hell plot, fresh murders, and demons closing in.

Reformed con man Moist von Lipwig has tamed the Post Office and is bored — so Lord Vetinari hands him the Royal Bank and Mint, plus a small dog who is now legally the chairman. To save the city's money, Moist must invent paper currency and out-con an ancient banking dynasty.

Down to two witches and needing a third, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg head to Ankh-Morpork to recruit the gifted young Agnes Nitt — who has fled to sing at the Opera House. But the Opera has a masked Ghost, and the bodies are starting to pile up among the arias.

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.

Thirteen short stories from Joe Abercrombie's First Law world, mixing reprints with new tales. The thief Shevedieh and the barbarian Javre bicker their way across Styria, while cameos from Glokta, Logen, Shenkt and Curnden Craw fill the gaps between the trilogy and the standalones.

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.

The origin story of David Gemmell's greatest hero. Long before he became the legend of the Drenai, the young Druss sets out across a brutal world to rescue his kidnapped wife, Rowena — a fast, violent, and emotionally charged tale of the making of an axe-wielding icon.

A Chronicles of Narnia tale set during the reign of the Pevensies. Shasta, a boy raised in the harsh southern land of Calormen, flees north toward Narnia with a talking horse named Bree, uncovering a plot of war and the secret of his own identity along the way.

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.

The fourth Witcher novel. As Ciri, hunted across the Continent, fights to survive and to reach the mysterious Tower of Swallows, the saga fractures its timeline and circles its darkest material, building toward the brink of its conclusion.

The first volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, Tad Williams's return to the world of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. Decades after the events of that trilogy, the aging King Simon and Queen Miriamele face a new threat as the immortal Norns stir again and a generation of new characters comes of age.

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.

Awakened to a power that could reshape the realms, Sera must master what she has become while war gathers and her bond with Nyktos faces its hardest test. Jennifer L. Armentrout drives the Flesh and Fire saga toward its climax with escalating stakes and high romance.

Reeling from a devastating betrayal, Seraphena must reckon with who — and what — she truly is, while the Primal of Death she was meant to kill becomes the one person she cannot resist. Jennifer L. Armentrout's second Flesh and Fire novel deepens the romance and the mythology.