Best Fantasy Books

An angel and a demon who have grown rather fond of the Earth team up to prevent the Apocalypse, while a small boy in Tadfield may or may not be the Antichrist.

In the city of Camorr — a fantasy Venice — a gang of elite con artists and thieves called the Gentlemen Bastards pull off elaborate heists while a supernatural criminal element threatens everything.

Kvothe — innkeeper, legend, the most infamous man alive — agrees to tell his life story to a Chronicler over three days. Day One: his childhood with a troupe of travelling performers, his time as a street orphan in Tarbean, and his legendary entry to the University where magic is studied.

In the remote mountain village of Kaigen, Misaki — a wife and mother who has suppressed her own formidable past — must confront both a devastating invasion and the lies her family and society have built their identity upon.

Tress has never left her small island. When the boy she loves is kidnapped and taken across the deadly spore seas, she sets out to rescue him — becoming a sailor, a pirate, and eventually a hero on a world she's never seen.

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.

Gideon Nav is a swordswoman, a necromancer's servant, and — against every wish she possesses — about to become a detective. When nine noble houses compete in a death tournament, the body count rises and someone is killing necromancers.

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.

In 14th-century China, a peasant girl takes on her dead brother's identity and his fate — greatness — and fights her way through the collapse of the Mongol Yuan dynasty to become one of history's most powerful figures.

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.

The second Fitz and the Fool novel. Reunited with the broken, tortured Fool and driven by grief and the loss of his daughter, FitzChivalry Farseer returns to the deadly arts of his past and the dangerous heart of the Six Duchies court.

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.

In a world inspired by ancient India, a fugitive princess and the emperor's servant discover a forbidden magic that could save or destroy their empire — and find each other in a situation designed to keep them apart.

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.