The 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

A comfortable hobbit is dragged out of his hole by thirteen dwarves and a wizard to help reclaim a mountain from a dragon. Lighter, funnier, and far shorter than what followed it, and still the best single introduction to the genre ever written. Read it before The Lord of the Rings, or read it instead — it stands entirely on its own.

The first volume of the book that defined everything after it. Yes, it takes its time; that's the point. Tolkien is building a world with a history you can feel underneath every scene, and the slow start is what makes the last third land. If you only know the films, the book is stranger and sadder than you remember.

A gifted boy goes to wizard school, lets his arrogance loose something terrible, and spends the rest of the book dealing with it. Short, spare, and morally serious in a way almost nothing else in the genre manages. Le Guin wrote prose no one has matched, and this is the best door into her work.

A street thief with a rare magical gift joins a crew planning to overthrow an immortal god-emperor. One part heist, one part revolution, and the clearest possible demonstration of Sanderson's rule-based approach to magic. The most reliable modern gateway book we stock.

An innkeeper who used to be a legend tells his own story to a chronicler over three days. Gorgeous prose, an unusually compelling narrator, and one of the most beloved fantasy novels of the last twenty years. Worth knowing going in: the series is unfinished and has been for a long time. Book one is a complete enough experience to be worth it anyway.

A secret society summons a dragon over Ankh-Morpork, and the only thing standing in its way is a night watch that barely exists on paper. The best entry point to Discworld, funny from the first page, and secretly one of the sharpest books about power and policing you'll read.

Noble houses maneuver for a throne while something far worse gathers in the north. Martin's innovation was treating fantasy politics with the ruthlessness of actual history, and the genre never really recovered. Book one is superb regardless of your feelings about the series' unfinished state.

The first volume of The Stormlight Archive, on a world scoured by supernatural storms, following a broken soldier, a scheming scholar, and a highprince's heir. The first arc concluded in 2024, which means there's now a complete five-book story waiting — the best time to start there has ever been.

The opening of The Wheel of Time, a fourteen-book epic that defined the doorstopper era. Jordan begins in deliberately Tolkien-ish territory and then spends a decade building something enormous and entirely his own. A serious commitment, and one a great many readers consider the defining fantasy series of its generation.

A world that ends periodically, a mother searching for her stolen daughter across it, and a magic system built on geology and oppression. Jemisin won the Hugo for Best Novel three years running for this trilogy — the first author ever to do it. Structurally audacious and completely earned.

The opening of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, and the deep end of the genre. Erikson drops you into a vast, ongoing conflict with no exposition and expects you to keep up. Difficult and divisive; readers who make it through tend to consider it the most ambitious fantasy series ever written.

A war orphan tests into an elite military academy and discovers a power rooted in something older and worse than politics. Kuang draws directly on twentieth-century Chinese history, including its atrocities, and does not soften any of it. Brutal, brilliant, and not a comfortable read.

An enormous standalone epic — queens, dragons, and a thousand-year threat resurfacing — that delivers the full doorstopper experience without asking for a series commitment. Rare and welcome.

A crippled torturer, a vain duelist, and a barbarian who's tired of it all, in the book that made grimdark a genre people name. Abercrombie writes the funniest dialogue in fantasy and uses it to make the bleakness go down easier. First of the First Law trilogy, and the standard everything else in this section gets measured against.

A standalone revenge story set in the same world: a mercenary is betrayed, thrown off a balcony, and works methodically through the list of everyone responsible. Reads perfectly well without the trilogy, and it's Abercrombie at his most controlled.

A teenage prince leading a band of murderers across a ruined landscape, narrated by a protagonist the book refuses to make likable. Genuinely divisive — some readers bounce hard off Jorg — and the ones who don't rate it among the genre's best.

A mercenary company serving on the wrong side of a war, narrated by its physician in flat, unromantic military prose. Published in 1984 and effectively the blueprint for everything else in this section. Cook was writing grimdark before anyone had a word for it.

Ships built from the bones of sea dragons, a disgraced captain given a cursed vessel as punishment, and a world where the last dragon might still be out there. A World Fantasy Award winner that stays weirdly under the radar.

A girl whose homeland is conquered by an empire decides to destroy it from the inside by becoming its most effective accountant. Fantasy about economics and colonial administration, which sounds unbearable and is in fact devastating. The ending is famous for a reason.

A gang of con artists work an elaborate long game in a Venice-like city, and then something considerably worse than the local nobility takes an interest. Sharp, funny, and the best pure heist novel in fantasy.

Six criminals, one impossible break-in, and a crew you'll be attached to before the job even starts. The most purely entertaining fantasy novel of the last decade, and the book that converts non-fantasy readers most reliably.

A thief in enormous debt to his guild is press-ganged into escorting a knight across a countryside ruined by war with goblins. Narrated in a voice so good it carries the whole book, and much funnier than the premise suggests.

The original sword and sorcery, collected in the order Howard wrote them. Pulpy, propulsive, and considerably better written than the genre's reputation implies — Howard was doing something new and doing it fast. Worth reading as the source rather than as a curiosity.

A sickly albino emperor, a sword that devours souls, and a deliberate rebuttal to the muscular heroism Conan established. Moorcock wrote Elric as an anti-Conan, and the whole modern taste for compromised protagonists starts here.

A princess sets out to kill her sister's abusive husband, accompanied by a dog made of bones and a reluctant fairy godmother. A Hugo winner, and the perfect bridge between this section and the cozy one — grim material handled with enormous warmth.

An orc barbarian retires from adventuring and opens a coffee shop in a city that has never heard of coffee. The book that essentially created cozy fantasy as a commercial category, and it's as charming as it sounds. Nothing terrible happens. That's the point.

A caseworker for magical children is sent to inspect an orphanage on a remote island and finds something closer to a family than an institution. Enormously warm, quietly angry about bureaucracy and prejudice, and a genuine word-of-mouth phenomenon.

A young hatmaker is cursed into an old woman's body and takes refuge in the walking castle of a spectacularly vain wizard. Wittier than the film, and Jones is one of the great fantasy writers of the twentieth century regardless of the shelf she was filed on.

A prickly Cambridge academic documents faeries in a remote northern village, in journal form, while refusing to admit she likes anyone. Cozy with actual teeth — the folklore underneath is genuinely eerie.

A tea monk and a robot travel together and mostly discuss what people are for. Technically science fiction, spiritually the coziest book on this list, and under 200 pages. The best thing to read when everything is too much.

A huntress is taken to a faerie court in payment for a killing, in the series that defined modern romantasy. Maas is also currently among the most frequently banned authors in American schools, which says considerably more about the banning than about the books.

An eighteen-year-old assassin is pulled out of a labor camp to compete for the position of royal champion. Maas's first series, and the one readers tend to recommend for the long arc — it gets substantially bigger and darker as it goes.

A woman built for the scribe quarter is forced into dragon-rider training instead, where the washout rate is death. The biggest fantasy debut in years and the book that took romantasy fully mainstream. Fast, propulsive, and unembarrassed.

A mortal girl raised in the faerie court decides she'd rather rule it than survive it. Black has been writing the sharpest faerie fiction in the business for twenty years, and this is her most beloved book — considerably nastier than its cover suggests.

A village girl is taken by the wizard who protects her valley from a corrupted forest, in a standalone novel that reads like a Polish folktale with the darkness left in. A Nebula winner, and the most literary book in this section.

A young woman raised as a sacred vessel, forbidden to be touched or spoken to, discovers what her role actually involves. Enormously popular, entirely unpretentious, and a good pick for readers who came for the romance rather than the worldbuilding.

English magic returns during the Napoleonic Wars, in a 1,000-page novel written in flawless nineteenth-century prose with hundreds of footnotes documenting a magical history that never happened. Utterly singular. Took Clarke ten years and won the Hugo.

A man lives alone in an infinite house of statues and tides, keeps meticulous journals, and believes there are only two people in the world. Under 250 pages, entirely unlike Clarke's first novel, and one of the best books of the last decade in any genre.

An ex-convict is hired as a bodyguard by a man who turns out to be considerably more than he appears, in a road novel about the old gods immigrants brought with them and the new ones America built instead. Won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker.

The Arthurian legend retold with humor, sorrow, and a deep unease about power and war — White was writing through the Second World War and it shows. The source for much of what everyone thinks they know about Arthur, and far stranger than its reputation.

The last unicorn in the world leaves her forest to find out what happened to the others. Slim, lyrical, and quietly devastating — a book people press on each other for a lifetime.

A conquered people whose country's very name has been erased by magic try to remember what they were. Kay writes historically-grounded fantasy better than anyone alive, and this is the one readers name first.

A patch of ancient English woodland generates physical archetypes out of the collective unconscious of everyone who lives near it. A World Fantasy Award winner and the foundational text of British mythic fantasy. Genuinely eerie.

The despised half-goblin fourth son becomes emperor overnight when an airship crash kills everyone ahead of him. A novel about a decent person trying to be decent inside a vicious court, and one of the kindest books in fantasy without ever being naive. Deeply beloved.

A moneylender's daughter, a Rumpelstiltskin figure, and a winter king, braided into something far richer than a retelling. Better than Uprooted, according to a great many readers, and it stands entirely alone.

Two young magicians are bound into a competition neither fully understands, staged inside a circus that appears without warning and opens only at night. Atmosphere-first fiction — read it for the world rather than the plot.

The Iliad retold from the perspective of Patroclus, from a boyhood exile in Phthia through the war that everyone already knows the ending of. Miller is a classicist, and the research holds — but what people remember is that she makes a story three thousand years old feel like it's happening to someone you know. Winner of the Orange Prize, and a book that has reduced a truly remarkable number of people to wreckage.

A girl in medieval Rus can see the household spirits everyone else has stopped believing in, just as a priest arrives to stamp them out. Russian folklore rendered with real cold in it. First of a trilogy, but complete enough to stop after.

An orphan from Canton is brought to Oxford to study translation, which in this world is the engine of imperial power. A furious, ambitious novel about language, colonialism, and complicity, with the academic setting rendered lovingly enough to make the betrayal land.

A girl in a wealthy collector's house finds a book about doors between worlds, and then finds the doors. A portal fantasy about who gets to travel and who gets collected. Lyrical and quietly angry.