Best Fantasy Books

Percy must navigate the deadly Labyrinth of Daedalus to prevent Kronos's army from using it to launch a surprise attack on Camp Half-Blood.

The Shadowhunter world is fracturing: the Cohort has seized control of the Clave, Emma and Julian's parabatai bond has become something that threatens to destroy them both, and an invasion from the faerie realm hangs over everything. The Dark Artifices concludes in Clare's longest single volume — 912 pages that resolve multiple series' worth of threads.

Aelin Galathynius — the assassin formerly known as Celaena — returns to Rifthold with one goal: free her friend Aedion and destroy the king who murdered her family. But the city she returns to is darker than the one she left, and her old enemies have become new allies in ways she never expected.

Death is fired by the Auditors of Reality and given a finite lifespan. Taking the name Bill Door, he becomes a farmhand and experiences for the first time what it means to be mortal. Meanwhile, in Ankh-Morpork, the life-force that would have been collected by Death has nowhere to go — and the city starts filling up with something very strange.

Shy South returns from a supply run to find her home burned and her siblings taken. She follows into the Far Country — the frontier beyond the Union's maps — on a wagon train west. Red Country is Abercrombie's conscious Western, a genre transplant that puts the First Law world's moral cynicism into the mythology of the American frontier.

The fourth Stormlight Archive novel follows the war against the Fused as Kaladin confronts depression, Navani discovers the nature of anti-Stormlight, and Eshonai's past is finally told.

The Vestrit family's liveship — a wizardwood vessel that becomes sentient after absorbing three generations of deaths at the helm — is contested between family members as debt, grief, and ambition pull it in different directions. Hobb's second Realm of the Elderlings trilogy expands the world of the Farseer books outward into the sea-trading culture of Bingtown.

Wax and Wayne pursue the legendary Bands of Mourning — a set of metalminds said to grant any user the full power of the Lord Ruler — leading them into uncharted lands and the revelation of a hidden civilization.

Roland the Gunslinger, wounded and feverish on a beach between worlds, must draw three companions from our world through mysterious doors: Eddie Dean, a heroin addict from 1987 New York; Odetta Holmes, a woman with a fractured personality; and Jack Mort, a serial killer whose removal from his world has unforeseen consequences.

Roland's ka-tet journeys through a decaying post-apocalyptic landscape toward the city of Lud, where a murderous computer named Blaine the Mono issues riddles to all who would ride him out of the dying city. Jake Chambers returns to the group, but his paradoxical existence threatens to destroy Roland's mind.

After resolving the Blaine cliffhanger, Roland tells his ka-tet the story of his first quest at fourteen: his love affair with Susan Delgado in the town of Hambry, and the betrayal that shaped everything he became. A 600-page flashback that is simultaneously the longest and most essential Dark Tower novel.

Maia, the half-goblin, despised youngest son of the elvish emperor, wakes one morning to learn that his father and all three of his elder brothers have been killed in an airship accident — making him, utterly unprepared, the new emperor of the Elflands.

Nobody Owens was raised by ghosts in a graveyard after the murder of his family. Growing up among the dead, learning their ways and secrets, Bod must eventually reckon with the world of the living — and the man who killed his family is still out there, waiting. A coming-of-age story set among the most protective community imaginable.

Three days. One hill called the Heroes. Two armies trying to take it. Abercrombie compresses an entire war into a single brutal engagement, following soldiers on both sides as they fight, scheme, and die. A standalone novel set in the First Law world that is less interested in victory than in the human cost of the pointless fights that constitute war.

The finale of the Wax and Wayne series pits Elendel against an existential threat while the Cosmere's larger machinations come into direct contact with the Scadrian world for the first time.

The Vivacia has been taken by the pirate Kennit, Althea and Brashen are fitting out the mad liveship Paragon to pursue her, and in Jamaillia the political situation threatens to destroy the Bingtown Traders' way of life entirely. The middle volume of the trilogy deepens every character and storyline, and Kennit's chapters represent some of Hobb's most complex and demanding writing.

Percy Jackson wakes up with no memory at a Roman demigod camp. With new friends Hazel Levesque and Frank Zhang — both carrying heavy secrets — Percy must journey to Alaska to free the god of death and stop a giant army from destroying Camp Jupiter.

The Union's industrial revolution has created a class of newly dispossessed workers whose anger is being channelled toward violence. The old powers — the banking houses, the Inquisition, the magi — are trying to control events and failing. The Age of Madness trilogy's middle volume watches everything Abercrombie built in A Little Hatred begin to collapse.

Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, along with their insufferable cousin Eustace Scrubb, are pulled into a painting of a ship and join King Caspian's voyage to the edge of the world.

Perrin Aybara finally confronts the Prophet of the Dragon while Mat Cauthon prepares a desperate mission to rescue Moiraine from the Aelfinn and Eelfinn. The Last Battle draws close as every major character moves into their final position.

Three Discworld witches — the formidable Granny Weatherwax, the cheerfully bawdy Nanny Ogg, and the romantically-inclined Magrat Garlick — find themselves entangled in a political murder. A king has been killed, the heir spirited away, and the witches are drawn into a plot that echoes Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear simultaneously.

Yumi is a yoki-hijo on a world of geothermal heat, summoning spirits through elaborate rituals. Painter is an artist on a world of perpetual darkness, holding back nightmare creatures with his brush. When their lives inexplicably intersect, each must learn from the other while solving the mystery of their connection.

As the Vega twins strengthen their powers and their alliances, darker forces move against Solaria — and the cost of the throne they were born to claim becomes terrifyingly clear.

The Vega twins face their most dangerous challenges yet as the threat from the Shadow Beast grows and the complicated feelings between the twins and the Heirs can no longer be ignored.