Best Fantasy Novels of All Time

Fantasy literature transports us to worlds of magic, myth, and moral complexity that illuminate the deepest truths about our own world. These are the novels that built the genre, defined it, and pushed it into extraordinary new territory.

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A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin's elegant tale of a young mage confronting his own shadow self is one of the most profound and beautifully written fantasy novels ever published — and one of the most underrated.

▲ Rising·Score +36

The Goblin Emperor — Katherine Addison

A young half-goblin unexpectedly inherits an empire in this warm, humane fantasy that is remarkably unusual for the genre — a story about kindness, leadership, and doing right by others.

▲ Rising·Score +30

Piranesi — Susanna Clarke

A miniaturist gem of 272 pages about a man living in a vast impossible house filled with tides and statues — one of the most original and quietly devastating novels published in the 2020s.

▲ Rising·Score +29

American Gods — Neil Gaiman

Gaiman's exploration of old-world mythology clashing with modern American consumer gods is a road novel, a mystery, and a meditation on belief that defies easy categorisation.

▲ Rising·Score +21

The Lies of Locke Lamora — Scott Lynch

A dazzling heist novel set in a Venice-inspired fantasy city, Lynch's debut introduced the Gentleman Bastards and one of the most charismatic and cleverly plotted fantasy series in years.

▲ Steady·Score +19

Mistborn: The Final Empire — Brandon Sanderson

A heist story set in a world where ash falls from the sky and the Dark Lord has already won. Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy is essential reading for its inventive metal-based magic system alone.

▲ Steady·Score +16

The Way of Kings — Brandon Sanderson

The opening volume of the Stormlight Archive is the most ambitious fantasy novel written in decades — a meticulously constructed world with airtight magic systems and characters of extraordinary depth.

▲ Steady·Score +16

The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss

Kvothe's lyrical first-person account of his journey from poverty to legendary status is fantasy prose writing at its most seductive and has accumulated one of the genre's most devoted fanbases.

▲ Steady·Score +13

The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien

The book that effectively invented modern fantasy literature. Tolkien's mythopoeic masterwork created a fully realised world complete with its own languages, history, and cosmology that still defines the genre.

▲ Steady·Score +12

The Fifth Season — N.K. Jemisin

Jemisin became the first author to win three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel with the Broken Earth trilogy, which opens with this devastating, formally experimental masterpiece.

▲ Steady·Score +9

A Game of Thrones — George R.R. Martin

Martin shattered the conventions of epic fantasy with a brutal, morally complex world where no character is safe. Its impact on the genre and on mainstream culture is incalculable.

▲ Steady·Score +8

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke

Clarke's debut is a dense, footnoted masterpiece about the return of magic to Regency England — an astonishing work of imagination that reads like an alternate history discovered rather than written.

▲ Steady·Score +8

“A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin”

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