Fantasy books have a canon problem. Not a shortage of lists, there are hundreds, but a strange consistency in what they leave out. TIME assembled a panel of famous authors for their hundred best and produced a list with no Robert E. Howard, no Clark Ashton Smith, no E. R. Eddison, no Lord Dunsany, no Michael Moorcock, no Patricia McKillip, no Stephen Donaldson, and no Steven Erikson. Readers noticed and said so loudly.
That’s not a small omission. It’s most of the lineage that made the genre possible, cut from a list that still found room for fourteen books by the panelists themselves.
So this list goes wide on purpose. It runs from the Victorians who invented secondary-world fiction, through the pulp magazines where sword and sorcery was born, into the modern canon, the doorstopper epics, and the writers working now. Fifty-five fantasy books, arranged chronologically, because the genre makes far more sense as an argument developing over a century and a half than as a ranked pile.
I write horror for a living and fantasy has been the other half of my reading since I was a kid, which means I’ve read a lot of this and have opinions about most of it. Where I’ve read something I’ll tell you what I actually think. Where a book is here on its historical record rather than my enthusiasm, I’ll say that too.
A note on scope: this covers fantasy broadly. The subgenres get their own treatment elsewhere, including my lists of the best urban fantasy books and books like Lord of the Rings, which covers Tolkien’s actual influences and descendants in detail.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Foundations (1858–1926)
Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858)
The book C. S. Lewis said baptised his imagination, written by a Scottish minister who effectively invented the modern fantasy novel.
Anodos wakes on his twenty-first birthday to find his bedroom transforming into a forest, and wanders into Fairy Land through a sequence of encounters that operate on dream logic rather than plot. He finds a woman of marble and wakes her with song, then acquires a shadow that darkens everything it touches, and finally serves in a palace, fights giants, and dies without the book treating death as a failure.
It barely functions as a narrative and that’s the point. MacDonald was after something closer to allegory without a fixed key, and the imagery is genuinely strange in ways Victorian fiction usually wasn’t.
Tolkien and Lewis both cite him as a source. Read it as the headwater of all later fantasy books rather than as a good novel, and it’s remarkable.
The Well at the World’s End by William Morris (1896)
The book that finished what Morris started two years earlier in The Wood Beyond the World: the modern fantasy novel set in a wholly invented world, no dream frame, no allegorical excuse.
Ralph of Upmeads, youngest of four sons, leaves home against his father’s orders and travels in search of a well whose waters grant long life. The journey moves through towns, forests, and petty kingdoms rendered in deliberately archaic prose, and the book is as interested in the landscape and the economies of the places he passes as in the quest itself.
Morris matters enormously to what came after. Tolkien attended the same Oxford college, took from him the practice of embedding poems and songs directly into prose, and scholars have traced specific Morris material into Gollum, Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the name Wormtongue.
The archaic English is a real barrier and worth pushing through, because every secondary-world fantasy novel downstream starts here.
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924)
Probably the most beautiful prose in the history of fantasy books, and one of the great omissions from TIME’s list.
The parliament of Erl decides it wants to be ruled by a magic lord, so the king’s son Alveric is sent across the border into Elfland to marry Lirazel, the elf king’s daughter. He succeeds. The trouble is what happens afterward, when a creature of Elfland has to live in a village where time runs differently and the neighbors attend church.
Dunsany writes in a cadence somewhere between the King James Bible and a fairy tale told aloud, and nobody has matched it. His influence runs through Tolkien, Lovecraft, Le Guin, Gaiman, and essentially everyone who has tried to make prose sound enchanted.
It’s short, it’s strange, and the passages describing Elfland’s frontier as a visible wall of twilight are among the finest in any fantasy books ever written.
The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922)
Nominally set on the planet Mercury, though the book forgets that almost immediately and mostly calls its world earth, occasionally even Middle Earth, three decades before Tolkien put the name on a map.
Demonland and Witchland go to war. That is the plot, sustained across four hundred pages of sieges, single combat, mountaineering, and sorcery, in a prose register lifted wholesale from Jacobean tragedy and executed with total conviction.
The title is the argument. An ouroboros eats its own tail, and Eddison built a book whose ending returns precisely to its beginning, because his heroes cannot conceive of a world without war to fight and would rather repeat it forever than live in peace. It is one of the strangest closing moves in the genre and it is entirely deliberate.
Eddison’s aristocratic warrior ethic is genuinely alien to modern taste, his character names are terrible, and the framing device evaporates in chapter two. Le Guin called it an eccentric masterpiece and that is about right.
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (1912)
Maybe the strangest book on this list and among the most influential on horror-adjacent fantasy.
The sun has been dead for millions of years, and the last of humanity lives inside the Last Redoubt, a metal pyramid nearly eight miles high, surrounded by a darkened landscape occupied by enormous silent Watchers and things that have been waiting outside the walls for aeons. A young man detects the presence of a woman in another, failing redoubt and walks out into the dark to find her.
The imagery is extraordinary and the prose is nearly unbearable, written in a fake-archaic style Hodgson sustained for two hundred thousand words. Read an abridgement or Stoker-style: skim the courtship, keep the landscape.
Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft, and later Gene Wolfe all took from it. There is nothing else like it in fantasy books before or since.
Pulp and Sword & Sorcery (1929–1977)
The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard (1932–36)
This is the foundation of sword and sorcery, and TIME’s most conspicuous omission.
Conan is a Cimmerian barbarian who moves through the Hyborian Age thieving, soldiering, pirating, and finally wearing a crown. Howard wrote him across twenty-one completed stories, most of them for Weird Tales, before killing himself at thirty, and the stories are not a series in any planned sense: they’re episodes from a life, told out of order.
What people forget is how good the writing is. Howard was a genuine prose stylist with an instinct for pace that pulp rarely produced, and the best stories, “Beyond the Black River,” “Red Nails,” “The Tower of the Elephant,” are tight, brutal, and atmospheric.
The politics are pulp-era and unsurprising, as they are in most fantasy books of the period: read them knowing what 1932 was. But the entire tradition of grim, mercenary, morally ambiguous fantasy runs directly from here to Abercrombie and Erikson, and the Del Rey editions with the original texts are the ones to get. Which editions those are, and why it matters so much with him, is the subject of my Robert E. Howard guide.
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance (1950)
The book that gave Dungeons & Dragons its magic system and gave the genre one of its great voices.
The sun is failing and Earth is impossibly old, its remaining people living among the ruins of countless dead civilizations in a world where science and magic have become indistinguishable. Vance wrote it as linked stories following magicians, adventurers, and confidence men through a decadent, exhausted landscape.
The prose is the reason. Vance writes ornate, formal, ironic dialogue that has never been successfully imitated, and characters who are unfailingly polite while attempting to swindle or murder each other.
Gary Gygax lifted the memorize-and-forget spell mechanic straight from it, which is why D&D magic works the way it does. The Cugel stories that follow are funnier and even better, and few fantasy novels since have matched that voice.
Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber (1970)
The term sword and sorcery is Leiber’s own coinage, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are the genre’s best double act.
A seven-foot barbarian from the Cold Waste and a small, quick former apprentice wizard meet in the city of Lankhmar, discover they like each other, and spend a series of stories thieving, drinking, and getting into trouble across a world of decadent cities and unhelpful gods.
The relationship is the whole appeal. Leiber wrote them as friends rather than warriors, with a comic timing and a warmth that almost nothing else in the pulp era attempted, and the stories move between farce and genuine tragedy without warning.
Lankhmar is the ancestor of every city in fantasy books with a thieves’ guild. Start with the collection containing “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” which is the finest thing he wrote in the sequence.
Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock (1972)
The deliberate anti-Conan, and the book that broke fantasy’s assumptions about heroes.
Elric rules a cruel, dying civilization he despises, too frail to stand without drugs, and the sword that replaces them, Stormbringer, pays out his strength in the souls of whoever it touches, his friends and lovers first.
Moorcock wrote him in explicit reaction against the muscular certainties of pulp fantasy, and attacked Tolkien’s politics in print for good measure. Elric destroys his own civilization, and every attempt at heroism costs him something he cannot replace.
The Eternal Champion cosmology that grew around it is enormous and uneven. The core Elric sequence is short, fast, and genuinely tragic, and its influence on grimdark fantasy books, on metal, and on gaming is impossible to overstate. If you’re interested, the wider multiverse, Champions and all, is untangled on my Michael Moorcock guide.
The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson (1954)
Anderson’s debut landed in 1954, the same twelve months that gave us the first volume of Tolkien’s trilogy, and the coincidence is instructive: two writers reaching into identical Norse sources and coming back with opposite books.
Skafloc is taken as an infant by the elf earl Imric, who leaves a changeling in his place: Valgard, grown from Skafloc’s own flesh and bound for a very different life. The two are set on a collision course, and the sword Tyrfing, reforged by a giant who wants it used, guarantees the outcome.
What Anderson understood is that saga literature is not consoling. His elves are amoral aristocrats at war with the trolls, using humans as instruments; his gods are indifferent; and his protagonists lose because the form demands it. Nothing is redeemed and nobody is spared.
Written young and in a headlong rush, by Anderson’s own later admission, and it reads that way, all forward momentum and doom. Moorcock took the cursed-sword logic directly and built Elric on it. Seek out the original 1954 text: Anderson’s 1971 revision softened it and lost the fever.
Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith (1932–53)
The third of the great Weird Tales writers alongside Howard and Lovecraft, and the one with the most sumptuous prose.
Zothique is Earth’s last continent under a dying red sun, a place of necromancers, decaying kingdoms, and gods that should not be worshipped. The stories are short, jeweled, and morbid, more interested in atmosphere and doom than in plot.
Smith’s vocabulary is deliberately archaic and enormous. He was a poet first, and the stories read like poems that acquired narrative by accident.
Vance’s Dying Earth is downstream of Zothique, and so is a great deal of what modern fantasy books call dark. Another writer TIME left out entirely.
The Modern Canon (1937–1983)
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (1937)
The book that took the genre out of the pulps and put it in every household.
Bilbo Baggins is a comfortable, unadventurous hobbit whose door is knocked on by a wizard and thirteen dwarves intent on reclaiming a treasure from a dragon. He goes, reluctantly, and comes back changed.
It’s a children’s book and reads like one: episodic, gentle, with a narrator who addresses you directly. That’s exactly why it works as an entry point, and why the chapter where Bilbo meets Gollum in the dark is so startling when it arrives.
Every fantasy novel after it is a response to what Tolkien did next, but The Hobbit is where the door opens. The whole Tolkien shelf, lifetime and posthumous, is sorted by reader on my Tolkien books guide.
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)
The most important fantasy book ever written, and the one every subsequent entry on this list is arguing with, extending, or reacting against.
The ring Bilbo found turns out to be the master ring of a dark lord who wants it back, and destroying it requires taking it into his own country. Around that spine Tolkien built a world with its own languages, histories, cosmology, songs, and geography, developed across decades before the novel was written.
The depth is the achievement, and it’s what separates it from the fantasy books that imitated it. Middle-earth feels ancient because it is ancient in the manuscript: the ruins the characters walk past have histories Tolkien wrote and mostly didn’t publish, and that iceberg effect is what every world-builder since has tried to reproduce.
It’s also a book about grief, endurance, and the fact that winning costs you the world you were fighting for. The scouring of the Shire, cut from the films, is the point.
For its influences and descendants specifically, see my list of books like Lord of the Rings.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (1950–56)
Seven short books covering the entire history of a world, from its singing into existence to its deliberate ending, told through a rotating cast of children who arrive from wartime England and leave again without control over either.
The series is wildly uneven and that is part of its charm. Book three, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a genuinely great episodic sea story, while the Silver Chair is the strangest and most frightening. The Horse and His Boy is the one whose portrayal of the Calormene has aged worst, and it has aged very badly indeed. The Last Battle ends the world and has divided readers for seventy years over what it does with Susan.
Read them in publication order, not chronological order, whatever the numbering on modern editions says: The Magician’s Nephew spoils the wardrobe.
Lewis was writing Christian allegory and never pretended otherwise, so the question is only whether it bothers you.
The Once and Future King by T. H. White (1958)
The Arthurian retelling that everything since has had to reckon with.
White takes Malory and runs it through the twentieth century: the young Arthur, called Wart, is educated by Merlyn through transformation into animals, learning about power from ants and geese. Then the book darkens steadily through Lancelot’s self-loathing, Guinevere’s aging, and the slow, inevitable collapse of everything Arthur built.
The tonal range is the achievement. It starts as farce and ends as one of the saddest books in English, and White’s Lancelot, ugly, devout, and cruel to himself, is a genuinely great character.
Written across the rise of fascism and the Second World War, and more openly political than most fantasy novels dare to be.
Titus Groan and Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (1946, 1950)
Fantasy with no magic in it whatsoever, and one of the most complete invented worlds ever built.
Gormenghast is a crumbling castle on the scale of a small nation, where the Groan family enacts rituals nobody remembers the meaning of, bound to a book of ceremony stronger than any law. The engine of the plot is a scullery hand named Steerpike, clever, entirely amoral, and unwilling to accept the position the castle has assigned him. He begins working his way upward, and people begin dying.
The reason it belongs among fantasy books is the castle. It functions as a secondary world with its own rules, history, and internal logic, and it’s as fully imagined as anywhere in this genre.
Peake drew before he wrote, and the novels read like a sketchbook given narrative: faces are caricatured to the edge of grotesque, rooms are rendered in obsessive physical detail, and the prose is baroque enough that some readers never make it past the first hundred pages while others reorganize their taste around it. The man behind the castle, painter and poet both, is covered on my Mervyn Peake guide.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
The most important fantasy book of the second half of the twentieth century, and a direct rebuke to a lot of what surrounds it.
Ged is a gifted, arrogant boy sent to the school for wizards on Roke, where his pride goads him into a summoning he cannot control. The rest is his pursuit of it, and its pursuit of him, across an archipelago world.
Le Guin’s magic runs on true names, and the discipline of her system, that power is limited, that every act has a cost, that the wise thing is usually restraint, is the opposite of the escalating power fantasies the genre often produces.
It’s also short, spare, and better written than most fantasy novels of any era. And yes, it has a school for wizards, published nearly thirty years before Hogwarts.
The later Earthsea books, particularly Tehanu, go back and interrogate the assumptions of the first three, which almost no fantasy writer has had the nerve to do.
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
An elegy disguised as a quest, and one of the most quotable books in the genre.
A unicorn discovers her species has vanished and goes looking. She acquires two companions along the way: Schmendrick, a magician cursed with immortality until he becomes competent, and Molly Grue, a bandit’s woman who has waited her whole life for something like this and is furious it arrived so late. Molly’s first line to the unicorn, demanding to know where she was when Molly was young, is one of the best moments in the genre.
Beagle wrote it in his twenties and it has the confidence of someone who has not yet learned what is difficult. Characters know they are in a story and argue about it. A talking butterfly speaks only in advertising jingles and song fragments.
Underneath the wit it is about aging, and about the specific grief of having wanted something for too long. King Haggard’s explanation of why he collects unicorns is the saddest speech here.
Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972)
The rabbit book, and one of the finest quest narratives ever written.
Fiver senses that something terrible is coming for the warren. Nobody in authority listens, his brother Hazel believes him anyway, and a handful of rabbits leave before the bulldozers arrive.
What follows is a political novel. Every warren they encounter is a functioning society with a different bargain at its center: one has traded vigilance for food and does not discuss the snares, another has traded everything for security under a warlord who rules by mutilation. Efrafa and General Woundwort constitute one of the great portraits of authoritarianism in English fiction, and Woundwort is genuinely frightening because his methods work.
Adams researched actual rabbit behavior and refused to prettify it, which is why the animals never feel like people in costume. He also gave them a trickster mythology that the characters tell each other in the evenings, and those interludes carry the book’s argument about what stories are for.
Marketed to children for fifty years. It opens with a vision of a field full of blood. It is genuinely frightening in places and unsentimental about death throughout.
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1980–83)
The most literarily ambitious thing the genre has produced, and the hardest book here.
Severian is an apprentice in the guild of torturers on a far-future Earth beneath a dying sun. Exiled for showing mercy, he travels toward the city of Thrax carrying an executioner’s sword and a relic, narrating his own story and claiming a flawless memory.
He is lying, or mistaken, or both. Wolfe constructed the whole tetralogy as a puzzle: the narrator is unreliable in ways you only notice on rereading, the vocabulary is real but archaic rather than invented, and the science fiction underpinnings are visible only if you’re paying attention.
Le Guin said Wolfe was our Melville. It rewards a second reading more than almost any of these fantasy books, and it demands one.
Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson (1977)
The most divisive fantasy book ever written, and another of TIME’s omissions.
Thomas Covenant is a leper, abandoned by his wife, shunned by his town, whose bitterness is total. He is pulled into a world called the Land, which begins healing him, and he decides the whole thing is a delusion he must not indulge. Early in the first book he does something so appalling that a share of readers close the book for good.
That act is the point and the risk. Donaldson wrote a fantasy protagonist who is not merely flawed but actively repellent, whose refusal of the standard hero’s journey is the entire argument of the series.
It sold in enormous numbers, defined a strand of adult fantasy novels, and remains genuinely hard to recommend. Know what you’re getting.
The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip (1976)
One of the most beautiful and most neglected fantasy books of its era, and a name that came up repeatedly when readers listed what TIME missed.
Morgon is a prince of a small farming island, a scholar with three stars on his forehead and no idea what they mean. Finding out drags him across a world of shape-changers, harpists, and land-rulers bound to their territory by magic.
McKillip writes prose of extraordinary delicacy, and the trilogy’s mystery is genuine: the reader works out the shape of things at roughly the same rate Morgon does, and the answer recontextualizes everything.
She won the first World Fantasy Award for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which is also excellent, shorter, and among the most overlooked fantasy books of its decade.
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (1970–91)
Corwin comes to in a hospital bed with his memory gone and claws his way back to the truth: he is a prince of the one true world, of which Earth is a shadow.
Corwin is one of nine brothers and several sisters, all of whom can walk between infinite parallel realities by adjusting the world around them as they move, and all of whom want the throne of Amber. The first five books are his; the second five belong to his son.
Zelazny writes in fast, wisecracking first person that has aged remarkably well, and the family politics are vicious in a way that predates Martin by two decades.
The concept of Shadow, and the Pattern that lets an Amberite walk it, is one of the great inventions in fantasy books.
Little, Big by John Crowley (1981)
The great American faerie novel and the most literary book on this list after Wolfe.
Smoky Barnable leaves the City on foot to marry into the Drinkwater family at Edgewood, a house with more inside than outside, built on a border. Five generations of the family live through the slow unfolding of something they call the Tale, while the City decays into authoritarianism.
Crowley’s sentences are luminous and slow, and the book demands patience of a kind that fantasy readers often aren’t offered. Harold Bloom put it in the Western canon.
Of all the fantasy novels here it’s the one most likely to become somebody’s favorite book and most likely to be abandoned at page eighty.
The Epic Turn (1982–2000)
The Belgariad by David Eddings (1982–84)
The most comfortable fantasy books ever written, and a genuine phenomenon that gets sneered at unfairly.
Garion is a farm boy raised by his Aunt Pol, who turns out to be a sorceress several thousand years old, traveling with a storyteller who turns out to be her father and the world’s most powerful wizard. An object is stolen. They go and get it back.
Every trope is present and executed exactly as expected, which is precisely the appeal. Eddings understood that comfort reading is a legitimate thing to want, and the banter between his cast carries five books effortlessly.
It won’t surprise you once. It has also been the on-ramp into fantasy books for an enormous number of readers, and there’s no shame in that.
The Black Company by Glen Cook (1984)
The book that invented grimdark before anyone had the word, and the most influential fantasy novel almost nobody outside the genre has heard of.
The Black Company is a mercenary outfit that takes contracts without asking too many questions, and finds itself working for the wrong side of a war between an ancient sorceress called the Lady and a rebellion prophesied to destroy her. Croaker, the narrator, is the company’s physician and annalist.
Cook wrote it while working at General Motors, and it reads like a war memoir: clipped, exhausted, unromantic, focused on logistics and small unit loyalty rather than destiny. The magic is terrifying because the soldiers don’t understand it and can’t do anything about it.
Erikson, Abercrombie, and Martin all owe it directly. Start here and the last thirty years of fantasy books makes more sense.
The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett (1983–2015)
Forty-one novels, and one of the great achievements in English comic writing regardless of genre.
Discworld is a flat world carried on four elephants standing on a turtle, and Pratchett used it to write parody, then satire, then some of the most humane novels of his era. The early books send up fantasy conventions, while the later ones are about policing, journalism, religion, war, and death, and they’re funny throughout.
The sequences are the way in: the Watch books beginning with Guards! Guards!, the witches beginning with Wyrd Sisters, and Death beginning with Mort. Small Gods and Night Watch are the two most people name as the peak.
Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are among the best characters in modern fiction, in or out of fantasy books. The full sub-series map, entry points and peaks included, is on my Terry Pratchett guide.
The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (1990–2013)
The defining epic fantasy series of the 1990s, and the one that established the modern doorstopper.
Three young men from a village called Emond’s Field are pursued by monsters, rescued by a member of a female magical order, and told that one of them is the reincarnation of a man prophesied to save the world and go mad doing it. Fourteen books follow.
Jordan built a world of extraordinary detail, denser than almost any of the fantasy novels around it, with a magic system split by gender, an intricate political order, and a genuinely huge cast. The opening deliberately echoes the Shire, and the series moves rapidly somewhere else.
The honest caveat is the middle. Books eight through ten are widely agreed to be where the plot stops moving, and Jordan died before finishing. Brandon Sanderson completed the last three from his notes and did it well.
I’ve read the first book and can vouch for the setup. Finishing it is a commitment measured in months.
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams (1988–93)
The trilogy that directly inspired George R. R. Martin, and one I love without reservation.
King John Presbyter dies after a long reign, his sons divide the realm, and something considerably older than the kingdom begins moving under the northern ice. Simon, a scullion in the castle, is caught up in it through no talent or destiny of his own.
The pacing is the thing readers argue about. Williams spends hundreds of pages in the castle before anything happens, and that patience is exactly why the back half detonates the way it does. The middle book contains a winter mountain trek that grinds its people down as hard as anything the genre has managed.
Pryrates is my favorite thing here, a villain with no tragic backstory and no secret wound, just a red priest whom everyone in the story correctly fears and nobody can touch.
Williams’s attempts at constructed language don’t convince, the single spot where the seams are visible. Everything else is superb, and Martin has said this series is what convinced him epic fantasy was worth writing.
A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin (1996–)
The series that changed what mainstream audiences expected from fantasy books.
One throne, seven kingdoms that want it, and a winter on the way that only the wrong people believe in. Eddard Stark is called south to serve a king he fought a war beside, and the consequences unspool across five volumes and a very large cast.
What sets it apart from other epic fantasy books is the low magic. The supernatural is rationed so strictly that each appearance lands like a debt called in, and the foreground belongs to the machinery of power: marriages, debts, and grudges, in a world where prophecy protects nobody.
I read as far as the fourth book and loved every one. The rotating viewpoints do the moral work, handing the narration to people you despise until you catch yourself understanding them.
The problem is obvious. It’s unfinished, it’s been unfinished for a very long time, and the safe assumption is that it stays that way. Read it knowing so. The rest of the shelf, Westeros and the career before it, is covered on my George R. R. Martin guide.
The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb (1995–97)
The most emotionally punishing fantasy on this list, and the one readers form the deepest attachments to.
FitzChivalry Farseer, a prince’s bastard, is surrendered to the royal household as a child and raised into quiet, deniable work. The scope is tight: one life, close first person, court politics and personal betrayal doing the work that armies do elsewhere.
Hobb’s particular skill is making you care and then not protecting anyone. The bond with the wolf Nighteyes carries more feeling than most fantasy romances manage, and the trilogy is willing to let its protagonist suffer without narrative compensation.
Slow, painful, and beautiful. Of the character-driven fantasy books here, this is the one.
Worth knowing that Farseer opens onto sixteen books across five series in the Realm of the Elderlings. The Liveship Traders is rated above Farseer by many readers, and the Tawny Man trilogy is where the whole thing pays off. Publication order is the right order. The full sixteen-book route is mapped on my Robin Hobb guide.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson (1999–2011)
My favorite fantasy series ever written, and the most ambitious thing in the genre.
Ten books, an empire at war on multiple continents, gods and ascendants intervening in mortal affairs for their own reasons, and a world whose history runs hundreds of millennia deep. The first book opens mid-siege, offers zero orientation, and expects you to keep up.
That approach loses more readers than any of these fantasy novels in the first two hundred pages, and rewards everyone who stays. Erikson is an archaeologist and anthropologist by training, and the world has the texture of a real one: dead civilizations underneath living ones, myths that turn out to be garbled history, and cultures that don’t map onto anything familiar.
The cast runs to hundreds of names and the soldiers carry it, bantering their way through campaigns with a gallows wit that keeps the scale human. Anomander Rake alone would justify the whole undertaking.
It’s more thoughtful than the reputation implies, willing to halt a war epic mid-stride to think at length about grief, compassion, and what witnessing is for.
Another writer TIME’s panel didn’t find room for.
The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist (1982–86)
Comfort epic fantasy done extremely well, and the series that launched a shared world spanning thirty books.
Pug is a kitchen boy on the world of Midkemia, apprenticed to a magician, when a rift opens between worlds and an invasion begins. He’s captured, enslaved on the other side, and trained in a magical tradition his own world doesn’t have.
Magician is the strongest entry and works as a standalone. Feist’s world began as a D&D campaign, which is visible and not a criticism: it gives the world a lived-in, gameable coherence.
Not innovative. Extremely readable, and one of the better on-ramps to epic fantasy books for someone coming from Tolkien.
The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind (1994–2015)
Included with reservations, because the first book is genuinely good and what follows is not.
Wizard’s First Rule introduces Richard Cypher, a woods guide who becomes the Seeker of Truth, and it’s a well-paced fantasy adventure with a memorably nasty villain and a genuinely clever central conceit about human self-deception.
The series then becomes a vehicle for Goodkind’s Objectivist politics, with characters delivering multi-page lectures, and the later books are widely regarded as unreadable. Goodkind also insisted, at length and publicly, that he wasn’t writing fantasy.
Read the first book. Stop there, or skip it and pick any of the other fantasy books here.
The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon (1988–89)
The most convincing military fantasy ever written, because Moon served in the Marines and knows what she’s describing.
Paksenarrion is a sheepfarmer’s daughter who runs away rather than marry a pig farmer, joins a mercenary company, and works her way up. The first book is almost entirely about being a soldier: drill, marches, latrine discipline, the boredom, the sudden violence.
Then it becomes something else, a genuine paladin’s story with a religious core that Moon treats seriously rather than as set dressing, and the third book takes its protagonist through something close to hagiography.
No other fantasy novels get the texture of military life this right.
The Modern Era (2001–2020)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2001)
Gaiman’s most ambitious novel and a genuine modern classic.
Shadow Moon leaves prison days after his wife dies and hires on with a battered old grifter who goes by Wednesday and drives him across America to recruit for a war. Belief is the food supply here: the gods that immigrants carried over and quietly stopped feeding now drive cabs and run funeral parlors, while fat new gods of media and technology crowd the table.
The road-trip structure lets Gaiman write America as an outsider sees it: the dying towns, the roadside attractions, the vast dull spaces. House on the Rock works as a sacred site precisely because it’s absurd.
It won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker awards, which almost no fantasy books manage. The middle sags and the Lakeside material outshines the main plot, and it’s still one of the defining fantasy books of this century.
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (1997–2007)
The most commercially successful fantasy series ever written, and the reason a generation reads at all.
An orphaned boy living under the stairs discovers on his eleventh birthday that he’s a wizard and is sent to a school he’s never heard of. Seven books track him from eleven to seventeen as a war builds around him.
The wizard school was not new. Le Guin’s Earthsea did it in 1968, and Le Guin said so with some asperity. What Rowling brought was the school-story structure applied at scale, a plot built to reward re-reading, and an ability to write child interiority that made the books work for adults reading them aloud.
The world doesn’t survive close examination. The economics make no sense, the moral framework around house elves is a mess, and the later books strain against their own rules. It’s on this list because the shape of fantasy books today is partly its doing, and because tens of millions of people entered the genre through that door.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (2007)
One of the most beautifully written fantasy debuts of its decade, and the most frustrating entry here.
Kvothe, in hiding as an innkeeper, tells his life story to a chronicler over three days: a childhood in a troupe of traveling players, years surviving as an orphan in a violent city, and admission to the University and its school of magic.
The prose is genuinely exceptional, the frame story is elegant, and the magic system built on sympathy and naming is one of the most distinctive around. Rothfuss also builds myth around Kvothe faster than the narrative confirms it, so you’re never certain how much of his own account to trust.
The third book has not appeared. It has been well over a decade. Go in expecting an unfinished story, as with several of the fantasy books here. The full situation, novellas included, is laid out on my Patrick Rothfuss guide.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (2006)
One of the best heist novels in fantasy, and the most purely enjoyable book on this list.
Locke and the Gentleman Bastards are con artists in Camorr, a Venice-analogue built on the ruins of an alien civilization, running an elaborate fraud against the city’s nobility while nominally bound by a treaty between the underworld and the aristocracy. Then something worse than either arrives.
Lynch writes dialogue like nobody else in fantasy books: profane, quick, and genuinely funny, and the flashback structure doles out the group’s history exactly when it hurts most.
The sequels are uneven and the series is behind schedule. This book is complete in itself.
The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie (2006–08)
Grimdark’s defining work, and a deliberate demolition of everything the genre had been doing since Tolkien.
The pieces look familiar: a wizard assembling a party for a quest, a barbarian from the North, a nobleman soldier, a war brewing. Then Abercrombie shows you what those people are actually like. Logen Ninefingers leaves bodies wherever he goes and knows it. Sand dan Glokta, the crippled Inquisitor who narrates the sharpest chapters in modern fantasy, is a torturer and by some distance the most compelling character in the series.
The quest goes nowhere it’s supposed to. The wizard is not what wizards are supposed to be. And the ending is one of the great anti-climaxes, in the best sense: the machinery of the story turns out to have been someone’s machinery all along.
Cynical where Tolkien is hopeful, and unlike most grimdark fantasy novels it earns the cynicism rather than performing it. Everything he has written since, standalones and second trilogy included, is on my Joe Abercrombie guide.
The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson (2006–08)
The most rigorously constructed magic system in fantasy, wrapped around a genuinely good question: what if the dark lord won?
A thousand years ago the prophesied hero went to face the great evil and failed. The Lord Ruler now governs an ash-choked empire where the nobility hold hereditary magic and everyone else is property. Kelsier, a survivor of the mines, assembles a crew of thieves to bring it down, and recruits a street orphan named Vin.
Allomancy, where ingested metals are burned for specific powers, is the most elegant magic system in fantasy books: rigorously ruled, cleverly deployed, and the source of spectacular action.
Sanderson’s prose is functional rather than beautiful, which is the standard criticism and a fair one. What he does instead is plot, and the payoffs across three books are immensely satisfying. For where to go from here, the Cosmere and beyond, my Brandon Sanderson guide has the map.
The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson (2010–)
Sanderson’s magnum opus and the largest single work in progress in the genre.
Roshar is a world scoured by regular hurricane-scale storms, where ecology and architecture have adapted accordingly, and where a war of vengeance grinds on across a shattered plain. Kaladin is a surgeon’s son turned soldier turned slave. Shallan is a young noblewoman with a scholarly cover story and a private catastrophe. Dalinar is a warlord having visions during the storms.
The world-building is extraordinary even by his standards, and the books are enormous, with the fourth alone running past four hundred thousand words.
The mental illness writing is what elevates it above comparable epic fantasy books. Kaladin’s depression and Shallan’s dissociation are handled with a seriousness the genre rarely manages, and they’re structural to the plot rather than decorative.
Five books of a planned ten. This is a decade-long commitment.
The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham (2011–16)
Probably the best fantasy series about economics ever written, which sounds like faint praise and isn’t.
A banker’s ward, a mercenary captain, a young nobleman, and an apostate priest move through a war centered on the empire of Antea. The priest’s order can compel belief by speaking, which spreads through a nation like a contagion and is genuinely frightening.
Abraham’s insight, rare in fantasy novels, is that wars are financed, and that a war chest is as decisive as a battle plan. Cithrin’s banking manoeuvres are as tense as any swordfight here.
Geder Palliako is the achievement: a bookish, awkward, sympathetic young man who becomes a monster through a series of understandable steps, and it’s the most convincing portrait of how ordinary people enable atrocity that fantasy has produced.
The Accursed Kings by Maurice Druon (1955–77)
Historical fiction rather than fantasy, included because Martin calls it the original Game of Thrones and because it belongs in the conversation.
Seven novels covering the collapse of the French Capetian dynasty after Philip the Fair destroys the Knights Templar and is cursed from the pyre. What follows is succession crises, poisonings, adulteries, and the slide into the Hundred Years War.
Druon writes it with the pace of a thriller and a genuine historian’s grip on the machinery of medieval power. The only magic is the curse, and it may just be coincidence.
If Martin’s politics are what you love about his fantasy books, this is the source.
The Witcher Saga by Andrzej Sapkowski (1993–2013)
By far the most successful fantasy export from Poland, and better than its games-and-Netflix reputation suggests.
Geralt of Rivia is a witcher: mutated, trained from childhood, and paid to kill monsters in a world where the monsters are frequently less monstrous than the people hiring him. The short story collections come first and are the best entry point; the novels form a continuous saga about a war and a girl with a prophesied destiny.
Sapkowski writes Slavic folklore rather than Anglo-Saxon, which gives it a texture unlike any of the Anglophone fantasy books here, and his dialogue is savagely funny.
The translations are inconsistent in quality. Start with The Last Wish.
The Broken Empire by Mark Lawrence (2011–13)
The most extreme protagonist in modern fantasy, and a book that dares you to keep reading.
Jorg Ancrath is thirteen when the book opens, leading a band of murderers across a broken landscape, and he has already done things the narrative refuses to soften. He watched his mother and brother die. He intends to take the empire.
Lawrence writes in a first person pared down to the bone, closer to aphorism than narration, and the reveal of what the world actually is, a post-apocalyptic Europe with technology mistaken for magic, recontextualizes everything.
It’s nastier than any of the other fantasy novels here and it means to be. If Covenant’s opening lost you, this will too.
The Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne by Brian Staveley (2014–16)
An emperor is murdered and his three children, scattered across an empire, each face a different threat.
Kaden has been raised in a remote monastery learning a discipline of emptiness. Valyn is training with an elite order of soldiers who ride enormous birds. Adare, the daughter, is inside the political machinery at the capital, which is the most dangerous place of the three.
Staveley’s monastic material is the standout: the training in nothingness is genuinely strange, and its eventual purpose is one of the better reveals in recent fantasy.
Underread, well-plotted, and among the better epic fantasy books for readers who want Martin’s structure with a finished ending.
The Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne (2012–17)
Traditional epic fantasy executed at an exceptionally high level, with the best battle writing in the genre.
A prophesied war between good and evil is coming, and the four books follow a large cast across several nations as it arrives. Corban, a blacksmith’s son, is the closest thing to a central character.
What Gwynne does better than anyone working is combat. He’s a re-enactor and it shows: shield walls, formations, the exhaustion and confusion of a melee, all rendered with a physical precision most fantasy hand-waves.
It’s unashamedly a good-versus-evil story in an era when most fantasy books abandoned them, and it commits completely.
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
The only trilogy to win the Hugo for Best Novel three years running, and the best world-building of the last decade.
The Stillness is a supercontinent so geologically violent that civilization is organized entirely around surviving apocalypses. Orogenes can quell or trigger seismic events with their minds, which makes them indispensable and terrifying, and they are enslaved, controlled, and lynched accordingly.
Three narratives: a woman whose husband has beaten their son to death for being an orogene, a girl taken for training, and a trained orogene on assignment.
Jemisin writes one thread in second person and makes it work, which almost nobody manages, and the structural trick underneath the three narratives is one of the best in modern fantasy.
It’s shelved with fantasy books and is arguably science fiction. Either way it’s essential.
The Dark Star Trilogy by Marlon James (2019–)
A Booker-winning literary novelist writing epic fantasy out of African mythology, and the most linguistically ambitious book on this list after Wolfe.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf follows Tracker, a hunter with a preternatural nose, hired to find a missing boy, traveling with a shape-shifting leopard and a company of mercenaries through a landscape drawn from across the continent’s myth systems.
James writes in a dense, oral, profane voice that takes fifty pages to acclimatize to, and the narrative is deliberately unreliable: the second book retells the same events from another perspective and contradicts the first.
It’s violent, sexually explicit, and difficult on purpose. It’s also doing something no other fantasy books are.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004)
Magic has been absent from England for centuries, studied by theoreticians who have never performed any, until Mr Norrell demonstrates working magic and undertakes its restoration as a private monopoly. Jonathan Strange signs on as his student and outgrows him into a rival.
Clarke writes a sustained pastiche of nineteenth-century prose with a scholarly apparatus of footnotes containing half-remembered folklore and the biographies of medieval magicians, and the Raven King hangs over all of it.
It took the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award, runs to nearly a thousand pages, and its real subject, magic as an institution negotiated by committees and publishers and government ministers, is unlike anything else in fantasy books.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)
Sixteen years after Jonathan Strange, a short, strange, perfect novel.
Piranesi lives in the House, an infinite structure of halls filled with statues, with an ocean in the lower levels and clouds in the upper. He believes there are fifteen people in the world, thirteen of them skeletons. He keeps meticulous journals.
The reader works out what’s happening well before he does, and the book’s power comes from watching a genuinely good, curious, grateful mind encounter what has been done to it.
It won the Women’s Prize. It’s under two hundred and fifty pages and the most purely beautiful of all the fantasy novels published this century.
The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang (2018)
Grimdark built on twentieth-century Chinese history, and one of the most brutal books on this list.
Rin, a war orphan, tests into the empire’s elite military academy and discovers a talent for shamanism that connects her to a vengeful god. The trilogy follows her from school story into a war modelled closely on the Second Sino-Japanese War, including an atrocity drawn directly from the Rape of Nanjing.
Kuang was a history student, and the novel’s argument is about what atrocity does to the people who survive it and then acquire power. Rin’s arc is a genuine tragedy rather than a redemption.
Not an easy read, and among the harshest fantasy novels here by design.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (2019)
Necromancers in space, and the most stylistically audacious debut in years.
Gideon is an indentured swordswoman in a decaying house of bone adepts who wants nothing more than to escape. Instead she’s dragooned into serving as cavalier to Harrowhark, the heir she despises, at a trial where the heirs of eight houses compete for immortality and start dying.
The voice is the thing: contemporary, profane, meme-adjacent, and set against genuinely gothic imagery and a plot that turns out to be far more carefully built than the tone suggests.
It divides people sharply. Those it lands for tend to consider it one of the great modern fantasy books.
The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty (2017)
Probably the best fantasy series built on Islamic and Middle Eastern mythology, and a genuinely great political epic.
Nahri is a con artist in eighteenth-century Cairo who accidentally summons a djinn warrior during a fake exorcism and is taken to Daevabad, a hidden city of brass ruled by djinn and riven by centuries of ethnic and religious grievance.
Chakraborty’s world is built with real scholarly care, and the politics are genuinely complex: there is no faction that is simply right, and the historical injustices at the city’s foundation implicate everyone.
The trilogy sticks its landing, which is worth noting on a list of fantasy books containing several that haven’t.
