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 15 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe Last Continent is the twenty-second of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, published in 1998. It sends Rincewind to the lost continent of XXXX, a place that resembles Australia in every way Pratchett could think of, and it has fun with the paradoxes of time travel along the way; the wizards of Unseen University spend much of the book trying to work out where he has gone.
Rating coming soonBlood of the Fold is the third book of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, published in 1996. It takes up the story where Stone of Tears left it, with Richard Rahl deciding that the only way to stop the advance of the Imperial Order is to take power into his own hands.
Rating coming soonMany Moons is a picture book by James Thurber, published in 1943 with illustrations by Louis Slobodkin, and it won the Caldecott Medal the following year. A young princess is ill and can only be cured by being given the moon, and the court has to work out how to get her one. The king's experts all explain that the thing is impossible; the person who solves it asks her the right question instead.
Rating coming soonKender, Gully Dwarves and Gnomes is an anthology of fantasy stories published by TSR in 1987, the second of the three Dragonlance Tales books. All ten of the stories are set in the world of Krynn, and together they range across races and places that the novels of the period never got round to, with a cast that changes from story to story.
Rating coming soonFive students at the University of Toronto are singled out of a lecture by a visiting professor and offered a journey to another world. Their host is Loren Silvercloak, a mage from Fionavar who has come to this world for five guests to mark the fiftieth year of a High King's reign. Four of them reach the kingdom of Brennin; a fifth breaks free during the crossing and arrives somewhere nobody planned. Fionavar, they learn, is the first of all worlds, where the old stories are still being played out, and each of the five turns out to have a part in what is coming.
Rating coming soonBartimaeus is a mid-ranking djinn with a long memory and no patience left for magicians, and in this prequel to the Bartimaeus trilogy he is serving in King Solomon's Jerusalem, where a magic ring commands spirits a great deal more powerful than he is. His master there is a cruel magician with a grudge, and the assignment is the Temple Mount. Into the same city comes Asmira, captain of the guard of the Queen of Sheba, sent to kill the king. Her mission and the djinn's servitude are on a collision course.
Rating coming soonPeter Grant, London's resident police wizard, is pulled into a case that begins with a dead teenager in a luxury flat and stops being ordinary almost immediately. The girl was the daughter of Lady Tyburn, a river goddess who has never had much time for Peter and now wants a favour from him, and the pathologist finds magic in the death as well as drugs. As Peter and Sahra Guleed work their way through the very rich, traces keep surfacing of a manuscript that has been missing since the eighteenth century.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden, Chicago's professional wizard, takes on two problems at once in the fifth Dresden Files novel. A priest asks him to recover the Shroud of Turin, stolen and on its way to a private sale, and a noble of the Red Court vampires challenges him to a duel that would settle a war by single combat. Neither job stays separate for long, and the people who took the Shroud turn out to belong to an older and considerably worse kind of trouble.
Rating coming soonEric Thursley is thirteen, a would-be demonologist, and certain that his three wishes deserve a proper demon. What his summoning produces is Rincewind, the least competent wizard on the Discworld, at that moment stranded in the Dungeon Dimensions and entirely unable to grant anything at all. Since the spells that bind demons work on him regardless, Rincewind has to make the wishes happen, which is how a boy, a wizard, a parrot and a very large walking luggage end up touring the Disc.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden is living on an island in Lake Michigan with a spirit growing inside his head and a headache that keeps getting worse, which is when Queen Mab informs him that he has a job to do. The job is to help Nicodemus Archleone, one of the people Harry would least like to help, break into a vault belonging to Hades. Harry agrees because of what Mab offers in return, and then spends the rest of the book waiting for the betrayal he knows is coming.
Rating coming soonBen Holiday bought a magic kingdom the way other men buy a farm, and in the second Landover novel the man who sold it to him comes back for it. Meeks returns with a glamour that makes him look exactly like Ben, so that Ben's own friends turn him out of his castle as an impostor. Winning it back means crossing a kingdom where nobody recognises him, while a black unicorn and a golden bridle draw everyone else into the same hunt.
Rating coming soonAlanna of Trebond is still pretending to be a boy, and she has become squire to the heir of the realm, which means her secret has grown rather than shrunk. Between her training and the first war with neighbouring Tusaine, she is learning how to use the magic she has mostly kept hidden, and how to live with the fact that the two men closest to her are both in love with a person she has decided she cannot be.
Rating coming soonThere is a road that runs through time, with an exit at every year and at every history that might have been, and only a small number of people can find it. Red Dorakeen has been travelling it for a long time, supplying weapons to the Athenians at Marathon and trying to restore a version of the past he half remembers, because somewhere off the road is a place he can no longer reach. He is also being hunted by a series of assassins, each of them with reasons of their 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