Best Fantasy Books

A rare magician who can travel between parallel Londons teams up with a street thief to prevent a dark power from destroying all the worlds.

Le Guin's first Earthsea novel follows Ged, a boy of extraordinary power who attends a school for wizards on the island of Roke and, in his pride, releases a shadow upon the world that only he can face.

Neil Gaiman's mythological fantasy follows ex-convict Shadow through a road trip across America with the god Odin, as old gods prepare for war against new gods born of technology and media.

The final volume of the Fitz and the Fool trilogy — and the conclusion of the entire Realm of the Elderlings sequence — takes Fitz on a journey to the city of Clerres to save the Fool and confront the Servants of the Pale Woman. A conclusion twenty years in the making, delivering one of fantasy's most emotionally complete endings.

Fifteen years after the events of the Farseer trilogy, Fitz lives in quiet isolation with Nighteyes. When the Fool arrives to draw him back into court politics — the young Prince Dutiful has gone missing — Fitz must choose between the solitude he has built and the duty he has never fully escaped. The first volume of the Tawny Man trilogy.

The First Law trilogy's conclusion delivers one of fantasy literature's most ruthless and genuinely surprising endings — a masterwork of subverted expectations that recontextualises the entire trilogy.

A great god is reduced to living in the body of a small tortoise because no one truly believes in him anymore — only one novice monk does — and together they must reckon with what faith really means in a world dominated by the institution built in his name.

Joe Abercrombie's debut fantasy introduces the Union, a corrupt empire, and three deeply flawed protagonists: a disabled barbarian, a self-loathing torturer, and a vain nobleman who slowly discovers courage.

Severian, a torturer's apprentice exiled from his guild for showing mercy to a condemned prisoner, narrates his journey across a dying far-future Earth in a memoir he claims is perfectly remembered but which the careful reader will find riddled with unreliable omissions.

Three timelines converge as Essun and her daughter Nassun race toward opposite ends — one to save humanity, one to end it — in the Hugo Award-winning conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy.

In a peninsula resembling Renaissance Italy, a sorcerer-tyrant has erased the very name of the province of Tigana from human memory as an act of grief and vengeance — and the few surviving Tiganans must restore it before their culture is gone forever.

Young Fitz, the royal bastard of the Six Duchies, is brought to the court of his grandfather King Shrewd and apprenticed to the royal assassin — learning to navigate palace politics, a forbidden magical bond with animals, and the profound isolation of being useful but never truly belonging.

Robert Jordan's final completed novel before his death in 2007: the storylines that had stalled across the previous two volumes suddenly and decisively accelerate, resolving long-running threads and propelling every major character toward the Last Battle.

Druss the Legend is an aging, cancer-ridden warrior who leaves his mountain retirement to help defend the fortress of Dros Delnoch against an overwhelming Nadir horde. A siege novel with the emotional power of a meditation on courage, mortality, and what it means to die well. Gemmell's debut novel and the founding text of heroic fantasy.

A collection of linked short stories introducing Geralt of Rivia, a witcher — a professional monster hunter whose moral compass is tested by the creatures he hunts, the people who hire him, and the world that neither trusts nor welcomes him.

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home and remembers an extraordinary summer when he was seven, a magical neighbor girl, and a darkness that threatened to consume the world.

Set in the same world as Perdido Street Station — Bellis Coldwine flees New Crobuzon on a ship that is captured by pirates and brought to Armada, a city built on a raft of lashed-together ships on the open sea.

The first volume of the Merlin trilogy tells the life of Merlin from childhood to the conception of Arthur — a rational, historically grounded retelling of Arthurian legend in which Merlin is a genuine historical figure with remarkable intelligence rather than a supernatural wizard. The finest Arthurian historical novel.

The third Bas-Lag novel — as New Crobuzon convulses with revolution, a man named Cutter travels into the wilderness to find the Iron Council: a perpetual-motion train run by the workers who took it decades ago, still running through the badlands.

In 1920s Mexico, a young woman accidentally frees the Mayan god of death from a wooden chest and must accompany him on a quest to reclaim his throne from his usurping brother. A lush fantasy rooted in genuine Mayan mythology, set against the Jazz Age and the Mexican Revolution's aftermath.

In the sprawling city of New Crobuzon, scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore a garuda's flight — and inadvertently unleashes nightmare creatures on the city. A landmark of New Weird fiction.

The fourth Earthsea book, written eighteen years after The Farthest Shore, reimagines the world from a feminist perspective. Tenar — last seen as a young priestess in The Tombs of Atuan — is now a middle-aged widow who takes in a burned, abused child named Therru. A deliberate rethinking of Earthsea's values and power structures.

Simon, a kitchen boy in the great castle Hayholt, is swept up in events that threaten the kingdom when the old High King dies and his heir plunges the realm into civil war. The first volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn — a series that influenced George R.R. Martin profoundly and proved that epic fantasy could carry genuine literary ambition.

The Malazan Empire's elite Bridgeburners are caught between imperial ambition and the machinations of gods, ascendants, and ancient powers as the conquest of the city of Darujhistan begins — the first chapter in a ten-volume epic that drops readers into a fully formed world and refuses to explain itself.