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Fantasy books

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 3 of the shelf.

685 books241 series70 tagged
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Cover of Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

The fantasy shelf

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Showing 48 of 685 books

Cover of Matilda by Roald DahlRating coming soon

Matilda

Roald Dahl · 1988

Matilda Wormwood teaches herself to read at three and has finished the children's section of her local library by the time she is five, which makes her the strangest person in her own house. Her mother plays bingo, her father sells second-hand cars with the odometer wound back, and neither of them sees anything unusual in their daughter. School turns out to be worse: Crunchem Hall is run by Miss Trunchbull, a former athlete who keeps children in a cupboard as a punishment. Matilda also discovers that she can move objects without touching them.

Classic fantasyYoung adult fantasy
Cover of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald DahlRating coming soon

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Roald Dahl · 1964

Charlie Bucket shares a small house with his parents and four grandparents, close enough to the largest chocolate factory in the world that he walks past it every day and smells what the family cannot afford. The owner, Willy Wonka, has hidden five golden tickets inside his chocolate bars and promised a tour of the factory to whoever finds them. Four of the tickets go to children with very determined parents, and Charlie finds the fifth almost by accident. The tour turns out to be something more than a tour, and the other children do not manage it well.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The Two Towers by J. R. R. TolkienRating coming soon

The Two Towers

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954

The Two Towers picks up with the Fellowship broken. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee have left the rest of the company and are crossing toward Mordor with the Ring and no plan beyond the next day, and the creature who has been following them catches up in the marshes. Meanwhile Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pursue the orcs who took Merry and Pippin across Rohan, where the riders of the Mark are fighting their own war. The volume ends in two different places.

Epic fantasyClassic fantasy
Cover of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis CarrollRating coming soon

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll · 1865

Alice follows a waistcoated rabbit down a hole and falls for long enough to look at the shelves as she passes them. What she lands in is a country where the rules of size, manners and logic have come loose from the things they are meant to describe: a drink makes her ten inches tall, a cake makes her nine feet, and every creature she meets has an opinion about who she is. She is accused of things she did not do and invited to a tea party that will not end. Getting home means arguing her way past a queen.

Portal fantasyClassic fantasy
Cover of Coraline by Neil GaimanRating coming soon

Coraline

Neil Gaiman · 2002

Coraline Jones moves into a large old house that has been divided into flats, with parents who are busy and neighbours who keep to themselves. There is a door in the drawing room that opens onto a bricked-up wall, and one day it does not. Behind it is a flat that looks like her own and is better in every way, with a mother and father who have buttons for eyes and who want Coraline to stay. They have been waiting for her, and the parents she left behind are still in the real house.

Dark fantasyGhost story
Cover of A Clash of Kings by George R. R. MartinRating coming soon

A Clash of Kings

George R. R. Martin · 1998

The seven kingdoms no longer agree about who rules them. With Robert Baratheon dead, three men have declared themselves king and a fourth is about to, and their war rolls across the Riverlands toward the capital. In the north, the Night's Watch rides beyond the Wall to find out what happened to the rangers who did not come back, and a girl being passed off as Arya Stark travels with a band of recruits the other way. Far off, Daenerys Targaryen is trying to keep her people alive in a desert city.

Epic fantasyGrimdark
Cover of The Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaRating coming soon

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 1915

Gregor Samsa wakes up in his family's flat as an insect and immediately starts thinking about his job. He is a travelling salesman, his parents and sister depend on the money he brings home, and the first problem the book poses is not the transformation but the fact that he cannot get out of bed to catch the train. Nobody in the family can look at him without difficulty, his employer's clerk arrives to ask what has happened, and over the following weeks the household reorganises itself around the creature in the back bedroom. The family has to decide what to do about him, and it does.

Weird fictionClassic fantasy
Cover of Animal Farm by George OrwellRating coming soon

Animal Farm

George Orwell · 1945

Mr Jones of Manor Farm is a drunk farmer who forgets to feed his animals, and one night the pigs call a meeting in the barn to explain why. The animals organise, drive Jones off the property and rename it Animal Farm, then paint seven commandments on the barn wall to keep the arrangement honest, the first of which is that everything on four legs is a comrade. Two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, lead the farm afterwards, and the working animals find that the new arrangement has a way of rearranging itself around whoever is doing the explaining. The book is a fable about the betrayal of a revolution.

Classic fantasyFairytale retelling
Cover of The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick RothfussRating coming soon

The Wise Man's Fear

Patrick Rothfuss · 2011

The second day of Kvothe's account of his own life takes him further out into the world than the first. He is still at the University when the book begins, still feuding with a fellow student whose family has more influence than his, and the quarrel finally lands him in front of a tribunal on a charge that sounds absurd until the reader remembers what he can actually do. Then he leaves: for a court where the rules of hospitality are the plot, for a forest where a bandit has been stopping the King's roads, and for a country where he learns to fight and to keep secrets from people who are better at both.

Epic fantasy
Cover of A Feast for Crows by George R. R. MartinRating coming soon

A Feast for Crows

George R. R. Martin · 2005

The kingdom is exhausted and the fighting has moved indoors. The boy on the throne is under the control of his mother and his grandfather's allies, the riverlands are ruined, and the survivors of the war are working out what to do with the oaths they swore to people who are dead. The Iron Islands and Dorne, both of which sat out the earlier campaigns, choose this moment to make their own claims. A young woman learns to serve a god she does not believe in, a knight wanders a country looking for a girl who does not want to be found, and the political business of holding a broken realm together is done in council chambers.

Epic fantasyGrimdark
Cover of The Well of Ascension by Brandon SandersonRating coming soon

The Well of Ascension

Brandon Sanderson · 2007

The Lord Ruler is dead, and the empire he held together for a thousand years is coming apart in the hands of the people who killed him. Kelsier did not survive the revolution he planned, so the work of holding the capital has fallen to Vin, the street thief he recruited and made into the strongest Mistborn alive, and to Elend Venture, the nobleman she chose. Three armies are converging on their city, the nobles are deciding which side to be on, and something older than the empire is stirring underneath it. The second Mistborn novel is about what a revolution costs the people who win it.

Epic fantasy
Cover of Mort by Terry PratchettRating coming soon

Mort

Terry Pratchett · 1987

Mort is a gangly, well-meaning boy whose father cannot think of anything to do with him, so he is apprenticed to the first person who turns up at the hiring fair, and the first person who turns up is Death. The job comes with a scythe, a horse, a house full of hourglasses and a boss who is unexpectedly interested in the human customs he is supposed to be harvesting. Mort is left to collect a princess whose hourglass has a limited amount of sand left, and taking an interest in his work is the mistake that sets the plot going. Death, meanwhile, takes a holiday.

Classic fantasy
Cover of Neverwhere by Neil GaimanRating coming soon

Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman · 1996

Richard Mayhew is a young Scottish man with a flat in London, a job in an office and a fiancee with firm opinions about both, and none of that survives the night he stops to help a girl bleeding on a pavement. Her name is Door, her family has been murdered, and the people who did it are looking for her; helping her also means becoming invisible to the city above, which closes over the space where Richard used to live. He has no way back except through Door's world, where the geography of the Underground has been turned into a place people live in.

Urban fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The Silmarillion by J. R. R. TolkienRating coming soon

The Silmarillion

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1977

The Silmarillion is the history that sits behind The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It begins with the making of the world by a group of powers Tolkien called the Valar and the arrival of the Elves, then follows the long wars of the First Age, when the great jewels called the Silmarils were stolen and the Noldor left the blessed realm to get them back. The middle of the book is a sequence of myths and narratives about that war, its oaths and its betrayals. The last part moves to the Second and Third Ages, including the drowning of Numenor and the making of the Rings.

Epic fantasyClassic fantasy
Cover of A Christmas Carol by Charles DickensRating coming soon

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens · 1843

Ebenezer Scrooge is a moneylender in London who does not give to charity, does not visit his nephew and does not see the point of Christmas, and the novella establishes him in a series of refusals on Christmas Eve. That night the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, arrives in his bedroom wearing the chains he made for himself in life, and warns him that he will be visited by three more spirits. They come one at a time, in the order of past, present and future, and they show Scrooge his own life rather than telling him anything about it.

Ghost storyClassic fantasy
Cover of The Graveyard Book by Neil GaimanRating coming soon

The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman · 2008

A family is murdered in their house in the middle of the night, and the youngest child, a toddler, escapes by crawling out of the door and up the hill to the graveyard next to it. The ghosts who live there argue about what to do with him, and the argument is won by a couple who have been dead for centuries and who take him in. He is called Nobody Owens, Bod for short, and he is raised among the dead, the caretaker and a guardian who can leave the graveyard when the living cannot. The man who killed his family is still looking for him.

Young adult fantasyGhost story
Cover of Stuart Little by E. B. WhiteRating coming soon

Stuart Little

E. B. White · 1945

Stuart Little is born to a human family in New York City and is a mouse, which nobody in the household treats as a problem requiring explanation. He is small enough to be lost in a hotel bed, to be posted through a mail slot and to sail a toy boat on the pond in Central Park, and he is polite, well dressed and resourceful in the manner of the era's children's fiction. He lives with his parents and his older brother George, and with Snowbell the family cat, who regards him as a snack and is not shy about saying so. The novel ends with him travelling north to look for a friend.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The Subtle Knife by Philip PullmanRating coming soon

The Subtle Knife

Philip Pullman · 1997

Lyra Belacqua walks out of her own world and into a city on a coast she does not recognise, following the trail of the thing she has been told is called Dust. There she meets Will Parry, a boy from our own version of Oxford who is looking for his father and who has killed a man on the way out of his house. Between them they find a knife with an edge that cuts openings between worlds, which is the most dangerous object either of them has handled. The trilogy's second volume is where the two stories join.

Young adult fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. LewisRating coming soon

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

C. S. Lewis · 1952

Lucy and Edmund are staying with their unpleasant cousin Eustace when a painting of a ship comes to life and takes all three of them into the sea off Narnia. The ship is the Dawn Treader, and its captain is Caspian, now king, who is sailing east to find the seven lords his uncle banished and to see what lies at the edge of the world. The voyage visits islands where the water turns things to gold, where dreams come true and where a man keeps a table set for a feast. Eustace is the character who changes most.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The Return of the King by J. R. R. TolkienRating coming soon

The Return of the King

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1955

The last volume of The Lord of the Rings begins with the war arriving at Gondor. Sauron's armies march on the city while its own leadership is divided, and the beacons that call Rohan for help are lit in the first chapters. Far away in Mordor, Frodo and Sam are still walking, with the Ring getting heavier and their guide less reliable every day. The book contains the battle at the Black Gate, the destruction of the Ring, the crowning of a king and several endings in succession, which is the structure readers either love or find hard to leave.

Epic fantasyClassic fantasy
Cover of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton JusterRating coming soon

The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster · 1961

Milo is bored by everything and cannot see the point of school, so one afternoon a tollbooth arrives in his room with a map and a set of instructions. He drives through it in his toy car and arrives in the Kingdom of Wisdom, where the cities are called Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and where the two princesses, Rhyme and Reason, have been exiled by their brothers. To restore them, Milo has to travel with a dog that ticks and a large beetle-like insect called the Humbug, collecting words, numbers and arguments along the way.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson BurnettRating coming soon

The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett · 1911

Mary Lennox is a ten-year-old brought up in India by servants and parents who did not want her, and when a cholera outbreak kills everybody in the house she is sent to England to live with an uncle she has never met. Misselthwaite Manor is a large, cold house on the Yorkshire moors, and her uncle is away most of the time. Mary is unpleasant and lonely until she finds a walled garden that has been locked for ten years, and a boy who lives in the house and cannot walk. The garden and the boy are connected.

Classic fantasy
Cover of Words of Radiance by Brandon SandersonRating coming soon

Words of Radiance

Brandon Sanderson · 2014

The second Stormlight novel continues the story of a world where storms sweep the continent on a schedule that shapes every building, every crop and every army. Kaladin has become a captain and can draw on the powers of a Radiant, which the people around him do not understand and his enemies are beginning to suspect. Shallan travels to the Shattered Plains to find a scholar and ends up using an ability she has been hiding. Dalinar tries to hold a coalition together while the storms get more dangerous. The book also introduces the Parshendi's own account of what has been happening.

Epic fantasy
Cover of City of Bones by Cassandra ClareRating coming soon

City of Bones

Cassandra Clare · 2007

Clary Fray is fifteen and has just started seeing things she cannot explain, beginning with a group of teenagers in a club that nobody else notices. Within days her mother has disappeared, her apartment has been wrecked and a stranger with strange markings has saved her life and told her that the world she grew up in is only part of the picture. The people who can see what she sees call themselves Shadowhunters, they hunt the things that come from elsewhere, and they tell Clary that she is one of them.

Urban fantasyYoung adult fantasy
Cover of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan SwiftRating coming soon

Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift · 1726

Lemuel Gulliver is a ship's surgeon who takes to the sea and keeps coming back with accounts of impossible countries. He is shipwrecked among people six inches tall, then left behind in a land of giants, then washed up among philosophers who have solved everything except how to live, and finally abandoned in a country ruled by horses where the human-shaped creatures are the animals. Each voyage is described in the flat, practical language of a travel report, and the four accounts together make up a book that has been read to children and argued about by adults for three centuries.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The Sea of Monsters by Rick RiordanRating coming soon

The Sea of Monsters

Rick Riordan · 2006

Percy Jackson is thirteen and finishing a quiet seventh-grade year when the trouble starts: the magic border that protects Camp Half-Blood has been poisoned, and monsters are getting through. Percy's friend Grover is being held prisoner by the Cyclops Polyphemus on an island somewhere in the Sea of Monsters, and the only cure for the camp's dying tree is the Golden Fleece, which is on the same island. Percy, Annabeth and Tyson, a homeless boy who turns out to be more than he seems, set out to sea to find both.

Adventure fictionMyth retelling
Cover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. RowlingRating coming soon

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

J. K. Rowling · 2007

Harry Potter leaves Privet Drive for the last time, and the protective charm that has kept him safe is broken. The Dark Lord is spreading fear through everything he loves, and hiding is no longer possible. To stop Voldemort he must find the remaining Horcruxes and destroy them, which means facing his enemy in a final battle. The story is a hunt rather than a school year, and the friends are separated from almost every protection they have relied on.

Witch and magicYoung adult fantasy
Cover of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. RowlingRating coming soon

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

J. K. Rowling · 2003

After Dementors attack his cousin Dudley, Harry understands that he has become Voldemort's next target. Many in the wizarding world deny that the Dark Lord has returned, but Harry is not alone, and a secret order gathers at Grimmauld Place to organise against him. Meanwhile Voldemort's assaults on Harry's mind grow stronger, and he must let Professor Snape teach him to defend himself before his time runs out.

Witch and magicYoung adult fantasy
Cover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. RowlingRating coming soon

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

J. K. Rowling · 2005

One summer night Dumbledore arrives at Privet Drive to collect Harry Potter, and his wand hand is blackened and shrivelled, though he will not say why. Rumour and suspicion spread through the wizarding world until it feels as if Hogwarts itself is under threat. Harry is convinced that Malfoy bears the Dark Mark, and he will need powerful magic and true friends as he investigates Voldemort's darkest secrets.

Witch and magicYoung adult fantasy
Cover of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank BaumRating coming soon

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum · 1900

Dorothy and three companions, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, travel the Yellow Brick Road towards the Emerald City to ask an audience of the Great Oz, the mightiest wizard in the land and the only one who can send Dorothy home to Kansas. The road is long, the witch who rules much of the country is not friendly, and each of the travellers is missing something they believe the wizard can supply.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of The House of Hades by Rick RiordanRating coming soon

The House of Hades

Rick Riordan · 2013

Hazel and the remaining crew of the Argo II face a choice. They can sail home with the Athena Parthenos and try to stop Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter going to war, or they can continue the quest for the House of Hades, where they may be able to open the Doors of Death, rescue Percy and Annabeth from Tartarus and stop monsters being reborn. Either way they have to hurry, because Gaea has set the date of her rise to power.

Myth retellingYoung adult fantasy
Cover of The Mark of Athena by Rick RiordanRating coming soon

The Mark of Athena

Rick Riordan · 2012

Annabeth is terrified. Just as she is about to be reunited with Percy after six months apart, it looks as though Camp Jupiter is preparing for war, and the Roman demigods have good reason to distrust the ship she arrives in. She also carries a gift from her mother that came with a command: follow the Mark of Athena and avenge her. An already heavy prophecy will send seven demigods to find and close the Doors of Death.

Myth retellingYoung adult fantasy
Cover of The Magician's Nephew by C. S. LewisRating coming soon

The Magician's Nephew

C. S. Lewis · 1955

Digory and Polly discover Uncle Andrew's secret workshop and are tricked into touching magic rings that take them out of this world. The experiment succeeds, and the little girl vanishes before Digory's eyes. Neither child is prepared for what follows, because the rings lead to the gateway of the land of Narnia, and to the beginning of its history. Digory's attempt to undo what his uncle has done is what carries the two children from the workshop into the new world.

Portal fantasyClassic fantasy
Cover of Insomnia by Stephen KingRating coming soon

Insomnia

Stephen King · 1994

Ralph Roberts is a retired widower whose sleep is steadily shortening. The insomnia turns out to have a consequence: it lets him perceive auras and other things that are normally hidden, and it draws him into a conflict between the forces of the Purpose and the Random. The novel is set in Derry, Maine, and connects to King's other work. His sleeplessness is treated throughout as a medical problem before it becomes anything else, which is what gives the book its slow pressure.

Dark fantasyUrban fantasy
Cover of Wolves of the Calla by Stephen KingRating coming soon

Wolves of the Calla

Stephen King · 2003

After escaping the wreckage of the insane mono Blaine and eluding the sorcerer Randall Flagg, Roland and his companions find themselves back on the beam. In the borderlands between Mid-World and End-World they are approached by frightened representatives of Calla Bryn Sturgis, a town that will be attacked within a month by the Wolves, masked riders who come out of Thunderclap once a generation and steal the town's children.

Dark fantasyEpic fantasy
Cover of How to train your dragon by Cressida CowellRating coming soon

How to train your dragon

Cressida Cowell · 2003

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was an awesome sword-fighter, a dragon-whisperer and the greatest Viking hero who ever lived, though it was not always like that. At the beginning he was the most put-upon Viking imaginable: not loud enough to be heard at dinner with his father Stoick the Vast, not strong enough to beat his rival Snotlout at the school's main sport, and not stupid enough to avoid a cave full of dragons.

Dragon fantasyAdventure fiction

What fits on this shelf

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 on this shelf

Tags are cross-cutting markers, not genres. They have their own landing pages.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 books on this shelf

The other shelves

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 booksPrimary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 booksPrimary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 booksPrimary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 booksPrimary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 booksPrimary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 booksPrimary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

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