The usual answer to "where do I start with fantasy" is Tolkien, which is a bit like answering "where do I start with music" by handing someone a Beethoven symphony. Not wrong. Not necessarily the fastest route to enjoying yourself either.
The genre is enormous and split into subgenres that share almost nothing. A reader who'd love a heist novel about con artists might bounce hard off a thousand-page political epic, conclude fantasy isn't for them, and never find out they were three shelves away from their favorite book. That's the actual failure mode, and it happens constantly.
So this is a diagnostic rather than a ranking. Find the version of yourself below, start there, and ignore everything else until you want it.
The five safest starting points
If you've never read fantasy at all and want the highest chance of a good time, take one of these. Every one is accessible, standalone-friendly, and has converted a genuinely enormous number of skeptics.
Start with what you already read
The most reliable way into a new genre is through one you already like. Find your existing shelf.
If you came to this from a screen
You watched the show, you want the books. Here's where each one actually starts.
What to save for later
Nobody tells beginners this and everybody should. These are excellent books that make terrible first books, and starting with one is the most common way people decide fantasy isn't for them.
The Silmarillion. Tolkien's mythology, and it reads like scripture rather than a novel — no protagonist, no scenes, thousands of years covered in summary. Magnificent once you love Middle-earth. Brutal as an introduction to it.
Malazan Book of the Fallen. Erikson drops you into an ongoing imperial war with no exposition and expects you to work it out. Devoted readership, ten complete books, and famously the hardest entry point in the genre.
Anything unfinished, if that will bother you. The Kingkiller Chronicle and A Song of Ice and Fire are both extraordinary and both have been waiting on a next volume since 2011. Some readers don't mind. Some are still angry. Know which one you are before you start.
A fourteen-book series, as a first commitment. The Wheel of Time is wonderful and it is also roughly four million words. Try a standalone first and find out whether you like the genre before you sign a lease.
Once you know what you like
Found something that worked? Here's where to go deeper. Each of these is a full list of its own.
- The best epic fantasy books — the doorstoppers, with notes on which series are actually finished
- The best cozy fantasy books — low stakes, high warmth, coffee shops
- The best romantasy books — sorted by how much of a commitment you want
- The best grimdark fantasy books — for when you want it bleak
- The best standalone fantasy books — one book, one ending, no waiting
- The best sword and sorcery books — thieves, mercenaries, and heists
- The best literary fantasy books — the shelf that gets called literature instead
Or take the whole map at once: our 50 best fantasy books of all time covers every one of those shelves in a single list.
And if the first thing you pick turns out not to work, that's information rather than failure — put it down and try another. The genre is enormous. Something in it is yours.
