Best Fantasy Books

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.

Fifteen hundred years after the death of the God Emperor, the human race has scattered across the stars and is now returning. Heretics of Dune, the fifth Dune novel, follows the Bene Gesserit as they confront a new power that threatens to end them and a child who may be the key to survival.

The fourth and final volume of the Inheritance Cycle brings the war against Galbatorix to its end. Eragon and Saphira must find the strength to topple a tyrant who has ruled for a century — and confront the question of what kind of world they want to build from the ruins.

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.

A teenage girl investigating the strange events in her suburban neighbourhood discovers that her mother and her mother's best friend performed dangerous magical rituals as teenagers — and that the consequences are still running.

Jorg Ancrath, thirteen years old and already a murderer leading a band of road brothers, pursues a path of calculated brutality toward the throne of the Hundred Kingdoms in a dark post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of modern civilization lie buried beneath a medieval fantasy veneer.

Teppic trains as an assassin in Ankh-Morpork, then inherits the throne of Djelibeybi — a tiny, ancient kingdom bankrupting itself on pyramids. When he builds the biggest one yet, the weight of accumulated tradition folds his entire country out of the world.

Geralt of Rivia arrives in the port city of Kerack only to have his prized swords stolen, dragging the monster-hunter into a tangle of court intrigue, sorcery, and danger in this standalone adventure set within the world of the Witcher saga.

An orphaned soldier discovers she harbors a rare power that could end a centuries-long darkness threatening her country — and draws the attention of a mysterious and dangerous commander.

The second All Souls novel — Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont timewalk to Elizabethan London, where Diana must learn witchcraft and retrieve the enchanted manuscript that holds the secrets of all creatures.

A new music arrives on the Disc — Music With Rocks In — and it will not let its players stop. Meanwhile Death, grief-stricken and absent, leaves his teenage granddaughter Susan to take up the scythe. A rock-and-roll fable about mortality, memory, and the things that outlive us.

An eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son is a sourcerer — a source of raw magic — and his arrival threatens to drag Discworld back to the Mage Wars. Only the cowardly Rincewind, the Luggage, and a barbarian hairdresser stand between the Disc and apocalypse.

Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard and private detective, investigates a pair of murders that required enormous magical power — and discovers something far darker than a simple killer.

The six Alexandrians have been initiated into the Alexandrian Society — the secret organisation that controls the world's most powerful knowledge. Now they must each prove their worth to the Caretakers, competing and conspiring among themselves while an external threat to the Society itself emerges. The second book in Olivie Blake's Atlas series.

The ka-tet fractures across time and world: Susannah is drawn to New York, 1999, carrying a demonic child that may doom or save the Tower; Roland and Eddie travel to Maine, 1977, where they must obtain the land for a vacant lot and encounter a young writer named Stephen King working on a novel called The Gunslinger. The meta-fictional stakes escalate dramatically.

In the Spanish Golden Age, a servant girl with a hidden gift for small miracles is thrust into a deadly contest of magic at court. Leigh Bardugo conjures a lush historical fantasy of secret power, survival, and the price of being seen in an age of inquisition.

David Gemmell's second Drenai novel, set generations after Legend. Tenaka Khan — despised for his mixed Drenai and Nadir blood — leads a desperate rebellion against a cruel, decadent empire, in a fast, brutal, and emotionally charged tale of heroism, redemption, and the cost of war.

Matty, a boy from Gathering Blue, now lives in Village — a community of outcasts and refugees — as it begins to close itself off to newcomers and the surrounding forest becomes deadly.

The conclusion of The Queen's Rising duology, in which a newly restored queen and her allies must defend a fragile new order against the deposed enemies determined to reclaim their power.

Rebecca Ross's debut, a young adult fantasy in which a young woman trained in the art of knowledge becomes embroiled in a dangerous plot to restore a fallen queen to her throne.

Kunal, a soldier sworn to protect the empire, and Esha, an assassin hunting the empire's generals, meet in unlikely circumstances and are drawn into a conspiracy that could destroy both of them — and the ancient magic holding their world together.

Alice steps through a mirror into a reversed world organized as a chess game. Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland introduces Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Queen — and refines his philosophical games with language, identity, and time.