The wider fantasy shelf: epic quests and fallen empires, grimdark cities, retold myths, quiet cosy stories and the odd talking animal. 685 books so far, across 241 series, plus 223 titles with no series listed. This is page 10 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonHonour Huston is the plain one of three sisters, and she has always disliked the nickname Beauty. When her father's ships are lost and the family has to move to the country, she is happier than she expected to be. Then her father comes back from a journey with a story about a castle in a forest, and Honour goes there in his place.
Rating coming soonJamie is the first boy Peter Pan ever brought to the island and the one who has stayed longest, which is the problem, because Jamie is growing up. He looks after the younger boys while Peter plays, and when Peter's jealousy of a new child turns dangerous, Jamie begins to see what Peter really is. How a lost boy became a pirate is the story of the island's rules.
Rating coming soonCimorene is a princess with an interest in fencing, magic, cooking and Latin, and her family finds all of it unsuitable. When they announce her engagement to a prince she cannot stand, she runs away, and the dragons she meets are happy to take her on. She becomes the princess of a dragon called Kazul, keeps the library and the treasure, and spends her time discouraging the princes who come to rescue her.
Rating coming soonDiamond sleeps in a loft above a stable, and the wind comes in through a hole in the wall. When he blocks it to keep warm he finds that he has stopped the North Wind from looking through her own window. She takes him with her through the night, over the city and out to sea, and Diamond discovers that she is a great deal more than weather.
Rating coming soonGeralt of Rivia kills a monster that was made to slaughter people, and within days he is under arrest, his two witcher swords are gone and he has made a powerful enemy. Getting them back means dealing with a sorceress, the authorities and a great deal of rumour. The novel stands on its own in the middle of the Witcher series.
Rating coming soonElsa is seven, she corrects other people's grammar, and she is bullied at school. Her grandmother is seventy-seven, drives the neighbours mad and tells her the stories of a kingdom called Miamas. When her grandmother dies, she leaves Elsa a series of apologetic letters to deliver, and each one introduces a neighbour whose real life turns out to be part of the fairy tales.
Rating coming soonAfter the battle with Lord Morgarath, Will and Evanlyn are taken prisoner and shipped north to Skandia aboard a wolfship. Halt, expelled from the Rangers for defying his king, sets out to find them with Will's friend Horace, who is a formidable fighter despite his youth. It is a long way, and winter is coming.
Rating coming soonThe forest cats have settled into five camps, following the spirit cats' instruction to spread out like the petals of a flower. Then the rogue Slash takes Star Flower prisoner and demands prey the cats cannot spare. Clear Sky needs the other four leaders to help him, and none of them trusts him enough to agree.
Rating coming soonMelanie puts on her mother's wedding dress one night and goes out into the garden, and the next morning she learns that her parents have been killed in a plane crash. She and her two younger siblings are sent to south London to live with an uncle they have never met, who makes life-sized puppets and toys and rules his household absolutely. His wife does not speak.
Rating coming soonThe demon dactyl has been destroyed, but the kingdom of Honce-the-Bear is not at peace: goblins and powries are moving deeper into settled land and a captive centaur is held at the monastery of St.-Mere-Abelle. Elbryan and Pony, who have known each other since childhood, set out to rescue him. Meanwhile the head of the church begins a private revenge.
Rating coming soonJason is fifteen and has never fitted in at home or at school, and his only comfort is a band called Lost Souls. Then he reads the note that was left with him as a baby and works out that his father was a vampire. He renames himself Nothing, runs away from home, and is picked up on the road by three beautiful strangers who know what he is.
Rating coming soonEmma Carstairs was a child when her parents were murdered, and she has spent the five years since then training to find out why. She and Julian Blackthorn are parabatai, bound to fight as a pair, and they run the Los Angeles Institute with Julian's younger brothers and sisters. Then the faeries ask for help with their own dead, and the bargain they offer brings one of the family home.
Rating coming soonUlysses Paxton is an American soldier who looks up at Mars in the night sky and finds himself standing on it, in the middle of a war. He is taken in by Ras Thavas, an old scientist known across the planet as the master mind, who has perfected a way of moving a brain from one body to another and sells the operation to rich old men. Paxton becomes his assistant, and then his opposite.
Rating coming soonRae Seddon, known to everyone as Sunshine, works in her family's bakery and wants a quiet evening by the lake. The vampires who take her are not interested in quiet. She wakes chained in the ballroom of an abandoned mansion, dressed in a long red gown, with a stranger chained in the same room who is also a vampire and is being left there to starve.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse is recovering from the torture she was put through during the short war with the fairies, and from the deaths it cost her, and she is not in a forgiving mood. Her relationship with the vampire Eric Northman is the best thing in her life, and it has made him a problem for the new vampire king. Then Eric's maker arrives with a guest.
Rating coming soonThe vampires came out in public a few years ago, and now the werewolves and shape-shifters have decided to do the same. In Bon Temps, Louisiana, the announcement goes better than anyone expected, at least at first. Then the body of a were-panther is found near the bar where Sookie Stackhouse works, and the town's new arrangements are tested.
Rating coming soonLara Calladine is an expert on ice caves, and the cave she keeps looking for is the one she was kept in as a child, where her father and her great-grandfather used her as a source of blood. Her aunts helped her escape, and the search now is to bring them out too. The trail leads her to the Carpathian mountains, and to a man who has come there to die.
Rating coming soonThe American minister to the Court of St James's buys a country house in England and is warned by the man selling it that Canterville Chase is haunted. Mr Otis says he will take the furniture as well as the ghost at a valuation, and moves in with his wife, his eldest son and his twin boys. The ghost, who has been frightening people there for three hundred years, has never met a family like this one.
Rating coming soonTwenty-seven years ago the sun failed, and since then vampires have taken the world and rebuilt it in their own image. The last living vampire hunter is a prisoner awaiting execution for killing a king, and the empress has not finished with him. She sends her historian to take down the story of his life, and he tells it.
Rating coming soonDiana Bishop is a historian from a family of witches, and Matthew Clairmont is a vampire who has been alive for centuries. They are looking for a manuscript whose contents could explain what they are. To find it they travel back to Elizabethan London, where Matthew's old acquaintances are waiting and where a woman who is not supposed to practise magic needs to be taught how.
Rating coming soonZoey has come back from the Otherworld and is on the Isle of Skye, where the queen wants her to stay and learn what she is capable of. In Tulsa, Neferet has been cleared by the vampire council and returned to her position at the House of Night, and she has a list. Stevie Rae is holding things together at school while working out what her connection to Rephaim means.
Rating coming soonAru Shah is fourteen and has just met a girl called Kara who says she is the Sleeper's daughter as well, which would make them sisters. Kara also claims to be a Pandava, and Aru is sure there are only five of those. Before anybody can settle the question, the two of them and their friends have to find their mentors in Lanka, the city of gold.
Rating coming soonWilliam Laurence wakes on a shore in Japan with no memory of the years he has spent as an aviator, or of the dragon he serves. He is taken for a foreigner who has broken the rules about where Europeans may go, and the local magistrate keeps him in comfortable confinement at Nagasaki. Temeraire, meanwhile, is repairing the transport that has run aground on a reef, and has no idea where his captain is.
Rating coming soonMost people in this near future live inside gated communities or travel in armed groups, and nobody who can avoid the desert goes into it. A physician named Blake Maslin is driving across the Mojave with his sixteen-year-old twin daughters when the three of them are taken by a man who has been out there for years. His name is Eli Doyle, and what he carries is not a weapon.
Rating coming soonThe Dynize have unlocked the Landfall Godstone, an object that could put gods back into the world, and the three people who have been fighting them for two books are running out of options. A spy is sent back into the occupied capital to stop the stone being used. A general who has been relying on an ancient weapon has lost most of her people and her eyesight. A mercenary has twenty riders left and a fleet that has scattered in a storm.
Rating coming soonThe capital has fallen to the invading Dynize, and the refugees from the city are following the only army still in the field. Three Godstones are said to exist, and whoever finds them decides whether the old gods walk the world again. One of them is missing, and three people are looking: a spy, a general with a shrinking command, and a mercenary with a head injury and a talent for violence.
Rating coming soonThe Sovan Empire has been a republic and is now an empire again, and two hundred years of government by argument left it with a problem: magic has been outlawed, so its enemies have something it does not. Sova is at war with Casimir and Sanque. A young diplomat is sent to look into reports of a cult of necromancers who believe an apocalypse is approaching, and a lieutenant on the frontier is dealing with something worse than soldiers.
Rating coming soonTea is thirteen when she accidentally raises her older brother from the dead, which tells her family two things: that she is a bone witch, and that they cannot keep her. She is sent away to train as an asha, and the training is long, expensive and political. Somewhere far ahead of that beginning, in a different narrative, an older Tea has been exiled for what she did with the power she learned.
Rating coming soonHazel and her brother Ben live in a town where the folk of the forest are part of ordinary life, and where a horned boy has been asleep in a glass coffin in the woods for as long as anyone can remember. Hazel grew up believing that she and her brother were destined to be heroes. Then the coffin is broken open, and Hazel has a good reason to think she is the one who did it.
Rating coming soonEdward Cullen has been seventeen for most of a century and has learned to keep away from human beings, whose blood he can smell. Then Bella Swan arrives at his school and he cannot decide whether he wants to save her or kill her. This is the story of Twilight told from his side, including what he can hear inside the heads of everybody in the room except hers.
Rating coming soonPern has not recovered from the plague that killed holders and craftsmen less than fifteen years earlier, and now the dragons themselves are falling ill. Fiona of Fort Weyr, the only surviving child of Lord Holder Bemin, is caught up in it when she impresses a gold dragon she was not expecting. The story takes place in the winter of 508 After Landing, weeks into a new Pass of Thread.
Rating coming soonFirestone is the mineral that lets the dragons of Pern breathe flame, and the mine that produces it has exploded, killing the men inside. A young man called Cristov volunteers to go back for the rock the dragons need, and the work is as dangerous as the accident that started it. His story is told alongside those of Pellar and Halla, who are the same age.
Rating coming soonMagic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, and the magic is worked by the High Magistry. Sciona has been an orphan since she was four and has spent twenty years studying to be admitted to it, and she becomes the first woman ever to hold the rank of highmage. Her colleagues' welcome is to give her a janitor instead of a qualified lab assistant.
Rating coming soonEmmy Harlow is a witch of modest power who left the magical town of Thistle Grove years ago and has avoided going back. The spellcasting tournament her family has always arbitrated is approaching, and tradition, or her parents, brings her home. On her first night in town she runs into Talia Avramov, and the two of them discover a shared grievance against the heir of the most powerful family in Thistle Grove.
Rating coming soonRobin Blyth is a baronet with a younger sister to raise, an estate emptied by his parents and no idea what to do with either. An administrative mistake puts him in the civil service post that liaises with a hidden magical society. His counterpart is Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly opposite number in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were somewhere else.
Rating coming soonThree sisters disappeared from a suburban street in Scotland when they were children and came back a month later with no memory of where they had been. Afterwards their hair grew white, their eyes darkened, and people found them disturbingly beautiful and slightly dangerous to be near. Ten years later the eldest, Grey, vanishes again, and the clues she leaves behind are strange.
Rating coming soonRingil Eskiath carries a broadsword forged by the kiriath, has been disowned by his family and is wanted by the slave traders of Trelayne. He is also being noticed by the dark gods, who are taking an interest without making any more sense than usual. With nowhere else to go he travels south, to the city at the heart of the Empire, where his old comrade Archeth advises the emperor.
Rating coming soonConnor O'Dwyer is a falconer in County Mayo who takes visitors on hawk walks across the countryside, and Meara Quinn, his sister's best friend, guides the same visitors on horseback. They have known each other their whole lives, and Connor has never thought about her any differently until a brush with death changes the arrangement. Meara does not want to lose the friendship, or herself, to something more.
Rating coming soonMaud Blyth volunteers to serve as a companion to an elderly woman on an ocean liner so that she can help her brother with an investigation into a magical conspiracy. What she does not expect is for the old lady to be dead on the first day of the voyage. She is left with a body, a disrespectful parrot and Violet Debenham, an actress and magician returning to England.
Rating coming soonThe ruling families of the Tressian Republic have turned on one another, and their knives are metaphorical only some of the time. None of them has noticed the armies of the Hadari Empire gathering on their borders. Viktor Akadra is the Republic's champion and hides something that would have him burned as a heretic, and Josiri Trelan, his sworn enemy, is a political prisoner whose sister wants only to escape the family name.
Rating coming soonIsla Crown has won the love of two powerful rulers and broken the curses that had blighted the six realms for centuries. Almost nobody knows where her own powers came from. After a betrayal she would rather be distracted than crowned, and the rulers she beat have not accepted the outcome quietly. Something capable of killing everyone on Lightlark is also on its way.
Rating coming soonVanja Schmidt was the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune and the dutiful servant of Princess Gisele, until her otherworldly mothers demanded a price for their care that she refused to pay. Instead she took Gisele's life for her own, using an enchanted string of pearls, and left the real princess a penniless nobody. Vanja now lives as princess and jewel thief at once.
Rating coming soonPrince Oak is imprisoned in the icy north and bound to the will of a monstrous new queen, and the betrayal that put him there was his own. High King Cardan and High Queen Jude would use any means to retrieve their stolen heir. Oak has to decide whether to try to win back the trust of the girl he has always loved, or to stay loyal to Elfhame and give up the one thing that would end her reign.
Rating coming soonAdam Black is immortal, arrogant and free to go wherever he likes, which has made him a great many enemies in the faerie courts. A curse strips him of his immortality and makes him invisible to everyone, which for a man like him is a sentence close to death. The only person who can see him is a law student called Gabrielle O'Callaghan, who has always been able to see both the mortal and the faery worlds.
Rating coming soonAt Ever After High, the children of fairy-tale characters are trained to take up their parents' roles, whether they want to or not. Every year on Legacy Day the students sign the Storybook of Legends and seal their destinies, and the village of Book End has always said that refusing to sign means the end of the story and of the life. Raven Queen is the daughter of the Evil Queen.
Rating coming soonNora Grey has survived an attempt on her life and gained a guardian angel, which she considers a fair exchange. Patch has been evasive ever since, and now he is spending time with Marcie Millar, who is the last person Nora would want near him. An old family friend has moved back to town, and Nora finds herself drawn to him even though she is sure he is hiding something.
Rating coming soonThe world has been wrecked by a century of excess, and what is left of humanity is being hunted and enslaved. Logan Tom remembers the past and has sworn to protect the future: he carries a talisman and an oath to find a being born of magic who is supposed to lead the final fight against the darkness. Across the country, a survivor called Angel Perez has been given a mission of her own.
Rating coming soonPrincess Eilonwy, the latest enchantress born of the House of Llyr, is sent to the royal court of the Isle of Mona to be educated as a young lady, an ordeal she regards as entirely unnecessary. Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper, travels with her. Soon after they arrive she is taken by agents of the sorceress Achren, who has a use for her in a plan of her own.
Fantasy here is the whole shelf, not one flavour of it. Epic and high fantasy sit next to grimdark, historical fantasy, myth and fairy-tale retellings, portal stories, urban fantasy and cosy books where the stakes are a shop, a tea menu and a found family.
A book lands here when the fantastic is the point of the story rather than the wallpaper. Romance can be part of it, and the books tagged romantasy sit on this shelf as well as on romance, but a book does not need a love story to qualify.
Tags are cross-cutting markers, not genres. They have their own landing pages.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books