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 14 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonAxl and Beatrice are an elderly couple in a Britain that has been at peace since Arthur's wars, and neither of them can hold on to a memory for long. They are certain they once had a son, and they decide to walk to the village where they believe he lives. On the road they fall in with a Saxon warrior and a wounded boy, and the errand turns out to be about more than the son.
Rating coming soonAerin is the only child of the king of Damar and the only person at court who looks like her mother, which is all the excuse the rumours need. She has not inherited the royal gift for magic, she is mocked for it and she is left to herself, so she teaches herself the things nobody else will. The princess the court did not want is the one who goes out to meet the dragons.
Rating coming soonA village sorcerer named Alder cannot sleep without being brought to the wall of stones at the border of the land of the dead, where the dead beg him to set them free. He is sent to find Ged, the former Archmage, who knows more about that country than anyone living. What Alder has been seeing turns out to concern the living too.
Rating coming soonCaramon Majere and Tasslehoff Burrfoot come out of their journey through time two years later than they meant to, into a world where an hourglass constellation fills the sky and nothing is alive. Raistlin Majere is in the Abyss with Crysania, and there is very little left standing between him and what he set out to take.
Rating coming soonA group of hackers spend their time inside a full-immersion virtual world they call the Other Plane, breaking into computers for money or curiosity. None of them ever uses a real name there, because anyone who learns a warlock's true name can make him work for them or have him killed in the world outside. Then the government finds out who one of them is.
Rating coming soonRaistlin Majere arrives at the Tower of High Sorcery in Palanthas to claim what belongs to the master of that tower, with his brother Caramon and the cleric Crysania beside him. Caramon set out to stop his brother's pursuit of godhood and now has to help him instead. The road they take leads back a hundred years, into the Dwarfgate Wars.
Rating coming soonDrizzt Do'Urden and Wulfgar are racing the assassin Artemis Entreri across the sea to Calimport, where their friend Regis is being held captive along with the panther Guenhwyvar and the gem that started all of it. The dwarf Bruenor is on his way there too, having survived something that everyone believed had killed him.
Rating coming soonIn a world where twelve dragons of good fortune supply energy to the earth, each of them is linked to a human Dragoneye. Eon has studied the art of dragon magic for four years in the hope of being chosen as an apprentice, and Eon is also a girl living as a boy in a place where girls are forbidden to hold the position at all.
Rating coming soonJaxom is the young Lord of Ruatha Hold and also the rider of Ruth, an unusual white dragon, and the two roles do not sit together comfortably. He wants to fight Thread the way the other dragonriders do, and he has to deal with the group of riders out of Pern's past who are making trouble for the Weyrs.
Rating coming soonThe Chaos War begins because the Irda, an island people who hide themselves under an illusion, break open a magical object in the hope that it will protect them from invasion. Inside it is an entity called Chaos, long considered too dangerous to touch. Meanwhile a Nightlord returns a dead man's body to his parents.
Rating coming soonThe gods have left Krynn and the dragons rule the continent, dividing the nations between them under a weak treaty about magic. Caramon Majere, on his deathbed, sends a Solamnic knight and a kender who has come back through the Device of Time Traveling to find the mage Dalamar, while a seventeen-year-old girl takes control of the Knights of Neraka.
Rating coming soonThe Good Magician Humfrey is accidentally doused with water from the Fountain of Youth and regresses to babyhood, and so does the dragon he was dealing with. At the same time, three-year-old Princess Ivy has wandered off into Xanth, and her mother Queen Irene has to find her. Ivy's talent, which nobody has recognised yet, is enhancement.
Rating coming soonHumanity in the far future is divided into guilds, each with its own function, and some of them have been engineered for the work: the Fliers can fly, and the Watchers watch the sky for signs of invasion. One Watcher travels to the old city of Roum with a young Flier girl and a Changeling who belongs to no guild at all.
Rating coming soonPern looks like a paradise to the colonists who choose it, and they come hoping for a simpler, agrarian way of life away from the wars they have left behind. Not long after they land, a lethal spore called Thread begins falling from the sky, and the colony has very little time to work out how to live through it.
Rating coming soonDrizzt Do'Urden has spent more than forty years in the Underdark and comes to the conclusion that neither he nor anyone near him will be safe while he stays there. He goes up to the surface, where what he is makes him an enemy before he has said anything, and where he finds what he actually is.
Rating coming soonMuch of Bingtown has been destroyed since the night the Satrap disappeared, and the factions inside it are fighting one another even while they hold off an invasion from Chalced. Ronica Vestrit has concluded that the town must change if it is to survive at all, and that it has to bring the Old Traders, the New Traders, the Three Ships folk and the freed tattooed slaves together into one people.
Rating coming soonMoreta is the senior Weyrwoman of Fort Weyr and her queen dragon Orlith is close to laying, and she is at the Gather at Ruatha Hold when a runner collapses in the middle of the races with liquid in its lungs. Nobody can say what the illness is, and a few days later it has become an epidemic spreading across the whole of Pern, with a quarantine ordered against it and the holds and weyrs shutting their doors.
Rating coming soonPrince Dutiful and Elliania are betrothed on the condition that he will kill the dragon Icefyre, and the two of them travel to the island where it lies with their households and their guards. They are met there by the Fool, whom Fitz left behind to keep him out of danger, and he means to save the dragon rather than kill it.
Rating coming soonElayne, Nynaeve and Aviendha use a ter'angreal called the Bowl of the Winds to undo the unnatural heat the Dark One has worked into the weather, and then have to escape a Seanchan invasion. In Andor one of their companions is murdered and the group works out that one of its own number belongs to the Black Ajah, while Perrin takes his people into Ghealdan.
Rating coming soonSeven years after the events of Dragonflight, the riders who came forward in time to help protect Pern are at odds with the riders who were already there. An argument between them ends with F'nor stabbed, and he is sent south to recover, where he falls in love and finds out what some of the Oldtimers have been doing.
Rating coming soonRobinton is born into a hall of harpers and is rejected by a father who is jealous of him, so most of his childhood is spent with his mother and with the musicians around him. He is writing successful songs while he is still very young, and he is elected Masterharper at a comparatively early age. When Lord Fax begins taking what he wants, Robinton is one of the people who sees it coming.
Rating coming soonTwo of the five hidden artifacts that open the great demon prison have been found, and the Society of the Evening Star is destroying one preserve after another as it hunts for the others. Reading Patton's Journal of Secrets, Kendra learns where the key to the vault holding a further artifact is kept, which sends the Knights of the Dawn into a dragon sanctuary called Wyrmroost.
Rating coming soonMacKayla Lane has been hunting her sister Alina's killer, and when she receives a torn page from Alina's journal and reads the desperate words on it, she knows the killer is close. What she is really after is the Sinsar Dubh, an ancient book of dark magic that corrupts anyone who touches it, and Dublin has become a dangerous place to be looking for it.
Rating coming soonThe dragons kept in the dragon sanctuaries no longer regard them as safe places to live, and they have started to see them as prisons instead and want their freedom back. In the hidden sanctuary of Wyrmroost, Celebrant the Just, King of the Dragons, is plotting his revenge: he means to overthrow the people who confined his kind and to bring back the Age of Dragons, when he and his kind ruled the world without any borders at all.
Rating coming soonWhen Golden Walter's wife betrays him for another man, he leaves home on a trading voyage rather than stay for the feud that would follow with her family. Word reaches him on the way that her clan has killed his father. He has a vision of three figures, a stately Lady, her Maid and a Dwarf in a yellow hood, and then a storm drives his ship to an unknown country.
Rating coming soonKissing the Witch is a collection of thirteen interconnected stories by the Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue. Each one retells a well-known European fairy tale, and several of them look at the familiar material through feminist and queer eyes. The stories are linked like a chain, with the narrator of one becoming the listener of the next, and none of the characters is ever given a name.
Rating coming soonThe script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was written by Jack Thorne from a story he developed with J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany, and it was published as a book in 2016. It is set nineteen years after the last of the novels and follows Albus Severus Potter, Harry's second son, as he arrives at Hogwarts and struggles with the weight of the name he was born with.
Rating coming soonDiana Wynne Jones's House of Many Ways, published in 2008, belongs to the same invented world as her earlier book Howl's Moving Castle. Charmain Baker, who was raised to be respectable and has never had to do a day's housework, is asked to look after the home of her great-uncle William, who is the Royal Wizard of Norland. The house does not behave like a house at all: its one front door opens onto other rooms, other countries and other times.
Rating coming soonOscar Wilde put out a small book of stories for children in May 1888 under the title The Happy Prince and Other Tales. The best known of the five is the title story, in which a swallow who has been left behind by his flock meets the statue of a prince who never knew sorrow during his lifetime and who now looks down on a town full of suffering people.
Rating coming soonAngela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, published in 1979, is a collection whose ten pieces are all built on fairy tales and folk tales, from Bluebeard to Little Red Riding Hood. Carter said that her aim was not to write new versions or adult fairy tales but to draw out what had been latent in the old stories all along.
Rating coming soonThe Golem's Eye, published in 2004, is the middle volume of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. It belongs to an alternate-history London where magic is a commonplace and the people who practise it hold most of the power, and its story turns on a golem and on the magical eye that brings such a creature to life.
Rating coming soonCraig Thompson's Habibi, a black-and-white graphic novel of more than six hundred pages, appeared in September 2011. The setting is an invented Islamic country, and the book follows Dodola and Zam, two children who escape slavery together and are then separated, taking on new names and new selves as the years pass before they meet again.
Rating coming soonThe Emperor's New Clothes is a literary fairy tale by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Its emperor cares only for fine clothes, and the tale turns on the way he is exposed in front of his own subjects. It came out in 1837 alongside The Little Mermaid, as the last part of a collection of his tales, and the phrase it gave to the language has been in use ever since.
Rating coming soonTrung Le Nguyen wrote and drew The Magic Fish, his first graphic novel, and Random House Graphic published it in 2020. The book is semi-autobiographical: the family at the centre of it is a Vietnamese family living in the United States, the mother and son in that family read fairy tales together as a way of practising English, and the boy is trying to work out how to tell his parents something about himself.
Rating coming soonPatricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, published in 1974, took the World Fantasy Award for best novel the following year. It is the story of Sybel, who has lived alone on a mountain with the mythical creatures her father summoned, and of what happens when a child is left in her care and she is made to promise that she will love it.
Rating coming soonThe Farthest Shore is the third of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea novels, published in 1972 and awarded the National Book Award for children's books the following year. Something is wrong with the world: magic is failing, songs are being forgotten and people and animals are falling ill, and the Archmage Ged sets out from Roke Island with a young prince to find the cause of it.
Rating coming soonOperation Chaos is a science fantasy novel by Poul Anderson, published in 1971 and made up of stories that had appeared separately before. It belongs to an alternate world in which the existence of God has been proved and magic is a working technology, and it follows a werewolf and a witch who meet during a war and stay together afterwards.
Rating coming soonThe Light Fantastic is the second of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, published in 1986. It picks the story up exactly where The Colour of Magic left off, with Rincewind the wizard, Twoflower the tourist and the Luggage falling off the edge of the world, and it turns on a threat to the whole Disc.
Rating coming soonHomeland is the first book of R. A. Salvatore's Dark Elf trilogy, and the story it tells begins before the better known adventures of its hero. It follows Drizzt Do'Urden from his birth in the underground city of the drow, through an upbringing in a society where kindness is a weakness, and out towards the principles he decides to live by.
Rating coming soonThe Dragonbone Chair opens the trilogy that Tad Williams called Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. It takes place in Osten Ard, a land shared by humans and other thinking creatures, and it follows a castle servant called Simon from the last days of a long reign into a country that is coming apart.
Rating coming soonThe Crystal Cave is a fantasy novel by Mary Stewart and the first of five she wrote about King Arthur and his world. It is told by Merlin himself, from his childhood until he is a young man, and it follows him across Wales, Brittany, England and Ireland as he looks for a place to belong.
Rating coming soonInteresting Times is Terry Pratchett's seventeenth Discworld novel, published in 1994 and set in the Aurient, his version of the Orient. The title comes from the saying about living in interesting times, and the story sends Rincewind, the least successful wizard on the Disc, a very long way from home, and into a fight over an empire he has never seen.
Rating coming soonThe Fall of Gondolin, published in 2018, gathers the several versions J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of one of the central stories of Middle-earth. It is one of the three great tales of the First Age, and it describes the founding of the hidden city, the centuries in which it stood, and the treachery that brought it down.
Rating coming soonUrsula K. Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea, published in 2001, is a book of stories and short essays that was designed to sit alongside the five Earthsea novels. Several of the pieces revisit the history of that world from the point of view of the women in it, and two of the stories had been published before.
Rating coming soonPtolemy's Gate is the third and last of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus novels, published in 2005. It returns to the alternate London where magicians govern by summoning spirits, and it also goes back through a series of flashbacks to the Egyptian magician Ptolemy and the djinni he called up in 126 BC.
Rating coming soonTerry Brooks's Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold!, published in 1986, opens his Magic Kingdom of Landover series. It begins with a Chicago lawyer who has lost his wife and his unborn child, and who answers an advertisement in a Christmas catalogue offering a whole kingdom of magic in return for a million dollars.
Rating coming soonThe Magicians' Guild is the first novel of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician series, published in 2001. It follows a girl from the slums of a walled city who turns out to have magic she cannot control, and the guild of magicians who have to find her before her untrained power does serious damage.
Rating coming soonGordon R. Dickson's The Dragon and the George, published in 1976, was the first of his Dragon Knight books. Its hero is a medieval historian at an American university who follows his fiancee into another world and finds himself inhabiting the body of a dragon. It is a comic novel, and the joke is that his reading has prepared him for everything about the Middle Ages except the way things actually work there.
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