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 5 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonEragon, once a farm boy and now a Dragon Rider, returns for the last stage of the war against the king who destroyed his order. With his dragon Saphira and his cousin Roran he has to gather allies, break a siege and face Galbatorix, an opponent who holds the true names of things.
Rating coming soonTenar is taken from her family as a child and raised as the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, servant of nameless powers that have no name she can be given. Her closed life is interrupted by a wizard's thief who comes for a treasure in the dark, and she has to decide what she owes the place that made her.
Rating coming soonHenry DeTamble has a genetic condition that throws him through time without warning or clothing, and Clare Abshire meets him for the first time when she is six and he is thirty-six. Their marriage is built around his disappearances, and the book follows the two of them out of order, from Clare's childhood to the end of Henry's life.
Rating coming soonTeppic is the crown prince of Djelibeybi, a small desert kingdom on the Discworld, and he has been educated at the assassins' guild in Ankh-Morpork. Called home when his father dies, he finds a country run by a priest who has managed it for seven thousand years and a pyramid-building habit that is about to cause serious trouble.
Rating coming soonMole leaves his burrow one spring morning and discovers the river, where Ratty teaches him to boat and the two become friends. Through Badger and the reckless Mr Toad, who is obsessed with motorcars, they are drawn into adventures, a court case and a plan to take Toad Hall back from the animals that have occupied it.
Rating coming soonEvery four years two children are taken from the village of Gavaldon and never seen again. Sophie, who is beautiful and desperate to be a princess, and Agatha, who is thought to be a witch, are taken together, and both are placed in a school where children are trained to become heroes or villains.
Rating coming soonThe Grinch lives in a cave above the town of Whoville with his dog Max and cannot stand the noise the Whos make at Christmas. He decides to stop the holiday altogether by dressing as Santa Claus, stealing every present, tree and decoration on Christmas Eve, and waiting on the mountainside to hear the wailing that should follow.
Rating coming soonDespereaux Tilling is a small mouse who reads books instead of eating them, and he falls in love with the human princess he is supposed to fear. When the mice sentence him for breaking their rules he is sent to the dungeon, where a rat who wants a princess of his own is already making plans.
Rating coming soonIn Icewind Dale, where the Ten Towns survive on the edge of the tundra, a barbarian named Wulfgar is defeated and indentured to a dwarf for five years. A crystal shard found in the mountains gives a wizard's apprentice the power he has always wanted, and the dark elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden is drawn into the defence of the towns.
Rating coming soonThe tenth book of the Wheel of Time opens with the world reacting to a vast display of power, while the three principal figures are each occupied with something else: Mat is fleeing with a kidnapped empress, Perrin is trying to free his captured wife, and Egwene is working to reunite the Aes Sedai before the Last Battle.
Rating coming soonCarter and Sadie Kane barely know each other: he travels the world with their Egyptologist father, while she lives in London with their grandparents. When their father attempts a ritual in the British Museum and releases five imprisoned gods, the two discover they are magicians and have to work together.
Rating coming soonCarter and Sadie Kane have spent months training as magicians since the gods of ancient Egypt were released into the modern world, and the task in front of them is to wake the sun god Ra before the chaos serpent can rise. They have five days to find the three parts of the Book of Ra.
Rating coming soonAfter her father dies in a car accident, Emily Hayes moves with her mother and brother into her great-grandfather's old house, where she finds a stone amulet in the library. When her mother is taken by a creature from below the house, Emily has to accept what the amulet makes her and go after her.
Rating coming soonAfter his grandfather is killed, Jacob Portman follows the clues he left and finds a Welsh island where an orphanage once stood, and where children with unusual gifts are living inside a day that repeats. The photographs Jacob has been collecting turn out to be records of real residents, and something that hunts them is still looking.
Rating coming soonSabriel has been raised outside the Old Kingdom, at a school in Ancelstierre, and knows her father only as the Abhorsen who lays the dead to rest. When he disappears she crosses the wall into a country where magic is loose, taking his bells and his sword, and has to take up the work herself.
Rating coming soonRedwall Abbey is a peaceful place of mice and other woodland creatures until the rat Cluny the Scourge arrives with an army. Matthias is a young mouse who wants to be a warrior like the abbey's legends, and the siege forces him to search the abbey's records for a sword and a founder he can follow.
Rating coming soonWill is an orphan at the castle and is chosen, on the day the wards are assigned to their trades, to be apprenticed to the Rangers rather than to the warriors he admires. His training takes him out of the castle and into the forest, and his first task turns out to involve the mountains.
Rating coming soonZachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student, finds a book in his university library that describes an episode from his own childhood, and follows it to a hidden world below the earth. There he meets people who belong to a story about the Starless Sea, and has to decide which part of it he is in.
Rating coming soonApophis, the serpent of chaos, is close to breaking free and swallowing the sun. Carter and Sadie Kane have to find a way to destroy him, which means executing the shadow of a god, and they have only a few months to work out how before the equinox and the end of the world they know.
Rating coming soonTessa Gray crosses the Atlantic in 1878 to join her brother in London and is taken from the docks by two women who want her for what she can do. Held in a house in the Downworld, she discovers she is not entirely human, and is rescued by the Shadowhunters who are hunting the same people.
Rating coming soonIn the seven kingdoms some people are Graceling, marked by eyes of two different colours and gifted with an extreme skill. Katsa's Grace is killing, and her uncle the king has used her as an enforcer since she was a child, until a rescue she carries out on her own account brings her into the company of a prince from another kingdom.
Rating coming soonAlanna of Trebond wants to be a knight and her twin brother Thom wants to be a sorcerer, so they change places: she takes his name and goes to the capital to train as a page while he goes to the convent. She has to conceal what she is among boys who would not accept her.
Rating coming soonApollo, now mortal and working for a teenager, is ordered west by his enemy Nero, and the instruction is aimed at stopping him from reaching the next oracle. He and Meg travel to Indianapolis, where they find the second of the oracles, the people running the city's supernatural business, and the allies who are left to them.
Rating coming soonTen-year-old Winnie Foster runs away from her fenced garden and finds a spring in the wood, where she meets a boy named Jesse Tuck drinking from it. His family take her home to explain why nobody should ever drink from that spring, and the Tucks have to decide what to do about a child who now knows their secret.
Rating coming soonCelaena Sardothien has been separated from everyone she loves and returns to the empire to take her revenge, recover her kingdom and confront the shadows she has been avoiding. The novel follows her in the capital while her friends work elsewhere, and the pieces of the old court begin to come back together.
Rating coming soonTwo thirteen-year-old friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, see a carnival arrive in their town in October, run by a man named Dark and offering a carousel that can make its riders older or younger. The boys are drawn to it, and the attraction turns out to trade in the one thing everyone wants and nobody should have.
Rating coming soonDouglas Spaulding is twelve in the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois, and the season is made of small ceremonies: picking dandelions for wine, a first pair of new sneakers, firecrackers and a friend who has just moved in. The novel follows him through the months as he works out, for the first time, that he is alive and will die.
Rating coming soonTwo princes, Peter and Thomas, are the sons of a king who is murdered by his own magician, Flagg, in a scheme that puts Thomas on the throne and Peter in a cell. The novel follows the brothers, the friends who try to save Peter, and the long plans of the magician who wants the kingdom for himself.
Rating coming soonZoey Redbird is sixteen when she is marked by a tracker and has to leave her family for the House of Night, a boarding school for fledgling vampires. She makes friends, acquires an unusually strong affinity for magic, and finds that the school has its own politics and that its leaders are watching her.
Rating coming soonThe battle for Camp Jupiter is over and New Rome is safe, but Apollo still has to face the last of the enemies he has been working towards, in a tower in New York. The novel is the final book of his time as a mortal, and it brings the series' threads together for one last fight.
Rating coming soonZelie Adebola's mother was a Reaper who could summon souls, until the king's soldiers took magic away from Orisha and killed the maji. Years later Zelie is given a chance to bring the magic back, and she has to make the journey with a princess and a young man who both have their own reasons for going.
Rating coming soonGen is a thief in the king's prison when the king's magus offers him a bargain: his freedom if he steals something that belongs to the gods. The journey to the temple takes him and the magus's party across the country, and Gen's account of it turns out to be less straightforward than it sounds.
Rating coming soonAtlas has been condemned to hold up the world, and Heracles, on his way to another of his labours, offers to share the burden for a while. The novel retells the myth with both men describing what they are carrying, and turns it into a story about the difference between a load that is given and one that is chosen.
Rating coming soonEustace Scrubb and Jill Pole are sent into Narnia by Aslan and given four signs to follow in a search for the prince who disappeared ten years earlier. They are joined by a gloomy marsh-wiggle named Puddleglum, and their journey takes them into the far north and then under the earth.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching, a young witch on the Chalk, interrupts a dance of the seasons and attracts the attention of the Wintersmith, who decides to make her his summer. As the winter refuses to end she has to work out how to deal with a force that is courting her, while the Nac Mac Feegle keep watch.
Rating coming soonSimon Snow is in his final year at a magical school and is supposed to be the Chosen One who will defeat a creature called the Humdrum. His roommate and rival Baz has not returned for the year, and Simon spends the term looking for him while his magic fails and the war outside the school comes closer.
Rating coming soonKaz Brekker and his crew have pulled off the heist that was supposed to make them independent, and instead they have been betrayed and one of their number has been taken. The novel follows the gang's attempt to get her back and to take their revenge in a city where every deal has a second purpose.
Rating coming soonAlina Starkov is an orphan serving in the army of Ravka when her unit is attacked crossing the Fold, a strip of darkness full of monsters that divides the country. Something she has kept hidden saves the survivors, and the discovery takes her out of the ranks and into the world of the Grisha.
Rating coming soonJacob Portman and the peculiar children leave the island where they had been safe and travel towards wartime London to find help for Miss Peregrine, who is trapped in the form of a bird. The novel follows their journey through a country at war and through loops that are closing behind them.
Rating coming soonHarrowhark Nonagesimus is on a ship with the Emperor and a handful of survivors, and she has been made a Lyctor. She remembers none of the events that led there, and the novel moves between her present and a version of the past that keeps contradicting what she is told about it and that she cannot check.
Rating coming soonCelaena Sardothien has won the contest to become the king's champion and is now required to carry out his orders while privately working against him. Her position becomes impossible when the next name on the list is someone she knows, and the novel follows her attempts to protect the people she cares about without being discovered.
Rating coming soonGeronimo Stilton, a mouse journalist, is pulled out of his office and into the Kingdom of Fantasy, where the queen has been kidnapped and the realm is in danger. He is given a quest and a set of companions, and the book follows him through the kingdom's regions as he tries to earn the title of knight.
Rating coming soonThe war against the Pannion Domin brings a coalition of armies, mages and undead into a campaign across a continent. The novel follows the soldiers and commanders on both sides of it, and the events of this book run alongside the second volume, filling in what was happening elsewhere at the same time and in the same war.
Rating coming soonThe Union is losing a war on two fronts. Crown Prince Ladisla rides north to push the Northmen out of Angland with the worst-armed, worst-led army in the world, while Superior Glokta is sent south to hold a city ringed by enemies and riddled with traitors, with allies he cannot trust and a predecessor who has vanished. Bayaz, the First of the Magi, leads a quarrelsome expedition east through the ruins of the past.
Rating coming soonEmily, Navin and the resistance fighters they have joined leave on an airship to look for the lost city of Cielis, hoping to find the Guardian Council and the Stonekeepers who might be able to help them. Time is short, because the Elf King is hunting Emily as well, and the survival of their world depends on reaching the city first.
Rating coming soonLionkit, Hollykit and Jaykit belong to ThunderClan and are the grandchildren of its leader, Firestar. A prophecy given at the end of the previous arc says that three cats of his line will hold the power of the stars in their paws, and as the three are made apprentices the Clans begin to argue about which cats belong among them and which do not.
Rating coming soonMenolly, a young musician who keeps nine fire lizards of her own, arrives at the Harper Hall on Pern to begin training as a harper. She is the first girl ever apprenticed there, the Masters disagree about whether she should be taught at all, and the students she has to live with resent her for being different.
Rating coming soonSnowfall is queen of the IceWings while still young, and she has a plan for keeping her tribe safe: nobody comes in and nobody leaves. Then a storm drives a crowd of unfamiliar dragons onto her shore asking for somewhere to stay, and the newcomers are in no state to be sent away again, so she has to work out what her rules are worth.
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