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 7 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonNimona is a shapeshifter who presents herself to Lord Ballister Blackheart as a sidekick, and he is a disgraced knight with a grudge against the Institute that runs the kingdom. The two of them set out to ruin it, with very different ideas about what is allowed. The story concerns a villain, the institution that decides who the heroes are, and a shapeshifter who follows no rules at all.
Rating coming soonApollo is still serving his sentence as a mortal teenager called Lester, with a demigod daughter of Demeter assigned to keep him company, and he still has to restore five dark oracles before he can go home. The third of those requires finding a Roman emperor in a maze. Apollo has to go through the Labyrinth to reach him, and he has none of his old powers to help.
Rating coming soonSophie and Agatha were best friends, then enemies, and their story was supposed to be finished. In the third book of the series it is being rewritten, and with the two of them apart the forces of Evil have taken over while the forces of Good are in danger. The novel follows the two girls after they have separated, and asks what it would take for them to be friends again.
Rating coming soonThree children are on holiday in the West Country when they find a country estate that looks like a castle out of a fairy tale. In a maze in the rose garden they come across a sleeping princess, who is a girl playing a game, and a ring that makes whoever wears it invisible.
Rating coming soonA chameleon sits on a leaf, catches a fly and notices the animals at the zoo, each of which has something he does not. He wishes for the best feature of each of them, and gets what he asks for, until what is left of him is a mixture that cannot do anything a chameleon does.
Rating coming soonJude Duarte is the exiled mortal queen of Faerie, without power and without a place, after being betrayed by the king she had put on the throne. Her twin sister's trouble gives her a reason to go back into the realm she was pushed out of. She is a mortal in a court of faeries, and her position there has to be taken back rather than granted.
Rating coming soonA tenth-century Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, is sent north and falls in with a company of Vikings, who take him with them to a settlement that is being attacked by something nobody can describe. The account of the journey is presented as his manuscript, and the second half of the book retells the story of Beowulf.
Rating coming soonPrincess Winter of Luna is admired across the court for her grace and kindness even though her face is scarred. Her stepmother, Queen Levana, rules by controlling what her subjects are allowed to see and think, and Winter's refusal to use that same power on anyone keeps her in danger. She is also in love with her childhood friend Jacin, a palace guard.
Rating coming soonFireheart is deputy of ThunderClan, carrying the clan's decisions while its leader is unwell. A rival leader across the forest has grown more powerful and more willing to use that power, and something has come into the woods that is killing prey and leaving the remains where no clan would put them.
Rating coming soonThe day after his twenty-first birthday, a young man finds a fairy woman hidden in a desk he has inherited, and wakes to find himself inside another world. He spends the rest of the book travelling through it, drawn on by his search for an ideal of beauty he calls the Marble Lady.
Rating coming soonUther, High King of Britain, is dead, and his only heir is an infant. The king's illegitimate nephew Arthur takes charge of the country as its protector, holding together kingdoms that are ready to fall apart while enemies arrive from across the sea and the loyalties of the men who served the old king come into question.
Rating coming soonIn 1842, thirteen-year-old Maria Merryweather is left an orphan and goes to live with her guardian in a village in the West Country of England. Moonacre Manor is beautiful, the village is charming, and the whole estate is under an old curse that has been running for generations and that nobody living there is willing to explain.
Rating coming soonThe Wart is a boy being raised in the household of Sir Ector, with no idea that he is anyone important. When the magician Merlyn arrives to tutor him and Sir Ector's son Kay, the lessons turn into a series of transformations into fish, hawks, badgers and snakes, none of which quite explain what the magician is preparing him for.
Rating coming soonTracker is a hunter known across the land for his ability to find anyone by smell, a gift he has spent years refusing to use for hire. He takes an assignment to find a boy who disappeared three years earlier, and breaks his own rule about working alone when a group forms around the search.
Rating coming soonAn expedition travels into the interior of Africa in search of a lost civilisation, and finds one: a kingdom ruled by a queen who has not aged in centuries and who is not pleased to be found. The explorers are confronted with a power they cannot reason with and a history that includes one of their own family.
Rating coming soonAzriel is a spirit summoned out of the ancient world and bound to serve whoever holds him, and in present-day New York he watches a young woman be murdered. He decides to act for himself rather than for a master, and to explain what he has become he tells the story of the life he was taken from, beginning with his family in Babylon and the bargain that turned a merchant's son into a servant of the bones.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl is twelve, a criminal by choice and the richest boy in Ireland, and he has a problem he cannot solve with money: his father is missing, and the trail leads to a kidnapping in the Arctic. At the same time the fairies he robbed in the first book need his help with a goblin uprising, and neither side is used to asking for anything.
Rating coming soonGregor is eleven and his little sister is not quite two when they fall through a grate in their apartment building's laundry room and end up in an underground world. There the inhabitants are waiting for them, because an old prophecy describes a quest that two people from above the ground are supposed to finish, and the boy from the laundry room is not pleased that anybody has decided that this is his job.
Rating coming soonA prophecy has named three cats, kin to the leader of ThunderClan, as the ones who will hold the power of the stars, and only one of them knows it. Jaypaw believes the answer is buried in the past, with the ancestors who walk through his dreams, and his search takes him and his littermates towards the mountains.
Rating coming soonTom is twelve and staying with his aunt and uncle in a converted house while his brother recovers from measles, and his days are made of boredom and rules about noise. At midnight the grandfather clock in the hall strikes thirteen, the back door opens onto a garden that should not be there, and a girl named Hatty is playing in it.
Rating coming soonTom is a climbing boy who goes up chimneys for a master who beats him, and after a fall and a chase he drowns in a river and wakes as a water-baby. What follows is his life under the water, where he is set lessons and given a moral education, all of it written as a fairy tale for a child who lives on land.
Rating coming soonLila's father makes fireworks for a king, and Lila wants to be a maker herself rather than a daughter who is married off. Told that she must find the Royal Sulphur from the sacred volcano of the Goddess of Fire to earn the title, she sets off through a country far to the east with her friend Chulak and a talking white elephant for company.
Rating coming soonNona lives with her family, works at a local school, and loves the beach and other people's dogs, and her city is under siege while the dead come back and a monstrous blue sphere hangs above the horizon waiting to tear the planet apart. Six months ago she woke up in somebody else's body, and she is afraid she may have to give it back.
Rating coming soonBryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar have saved their city and would now like a quiet life, but a rebellion is forming against the rulers who have left them alone so far. They are drawn into the rebels' plans, and the choice in front of them is whether to keep their heads down while other people are oppressed or to join in.
Rating coming soonNikolai Lantsov is the young king of Ravka, and the country he inherited is bankrupt, its borders are under pressure and its army has been reduced. He also carries something inside him that arrived during the civil war and that he has told nobody about, and it is getting harder to keep it where it is.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson saved the world more than once, and now he wants to finish his senior year of school and get into university like anybody else his age. The gods have other plans, and the letter of recommendation he needs from Mount Olympus can only be earned by completing three more quests for them, starting with one that somebody else has already made a mess of.
Rating coming soonZafira is the Hunter, who dresses as a man to go into a cursed forest and bring back food for her people, and whose identity would be worth her life if it were known. Nasir is the Prince of Death, who kills for his father the sultan, and the sultan has now sent him to find the Hunter and finish her.
Rating coming soonLaia is a Scholar living under the rule of the Martial Empire, and when her brother is arrested for treason she goes undercover as a slave at the empire's military academy in exchange for the rebels' help in saving him. Elias is a soldier at the same academy who wants out of the life he was raised for.
Rating coming soonIrene is a princess in a mountain kingdom, and she is a small girl in a large palace with more stairs and corridors than anyone has told her about. In one of the upper rooms she meets her great-grandmother, who is very old and very hard to find twice, and below the palace there are goblins who have plans for the kingdom.
Rating coming soonFive brothers and sisters are digging in a gravel pit near the house they have moved to when they uncover something that has been asleep for a very long time. It is a sand-fairy who grants wishes and whose temper is not improved by being woken up, and the children get one wish each day, which lasts only until sunset and cannot be taken back.
Rating coming soonClary Fray would like her life to go back to normal, which is difficult now that she can see werewolves, vampires and faeries and knows she is one of the Shadowhunters who police them. Her mother is in a magically induced coma, and the man who put her there is still collecting the objects he needs.
Rating coming soonOn a mountainside at the edge of the empire live warriors who are said to be the most powerful in the world, able to raise the sea and make blades out of ice. For centuries the families of the Kusanagi Peninsula have held the empire's enemies at the coast, and the world they were trained for is no longer the one they are living in.
Rating coming soonEbun gives birth to her daughter Eniiyi on the same day the family buries her cousin Monife, and the baby's resemblance to the dead woman is impossible to miss. The family takes that resemblance as proof that the child is Monife returned, and the curse that has kept three generations of women in one house begins to close over the new one.
Rating coming soonMercy Hollings has never been sure she is entirely human, and the medical tests she has had over the years have shown nothing unusual. What she does have is the ability to make people do as she tells them, which is useful until she loses her temper, and then it is very dangerous for everyone nearby.
Rating coming soonSundew has wanted to destroy the HiveWings since she was old enough to understand what they did to her tribe, and it is the whole purpose of her life. The LeafWings survive only in the Poison Jungle, a place dangerous enough to have kept them safe, and Sundew has to decide what the war costs the people she is fighting for.
Rating coming soonThe four nations have settled on Yun as the next Avatar after years of searching, and then a demonstration of bending by Kyoshi, who is Yun's friend and servant, throws the whole identification into doubt. With the identity of the true Avatar at stake, Kyoshi and her friend Rangi flee the mansion where they have been living and go on the run together.
Rating coming soonA young villager in a world built out of blocks has been keeping a diary of his attempts to become a warrior instead of the farmer everyone expects him to be. The sixth book of the journal takes him further into the working life of the village, where the skills he has been practising are needed for something larger than his own training.
Rating coming soonSophie Foster wants answers about who she is and what was done to her, and she has learned that the truth about her own past is the most dangerous thing she could go looking for. She is not the only one with gaps in her history, and the people around her have family secrets of their own.
Rating coming soonClaire Fraser has lived in the North Carolina backcountry with her husband Jamie for years, keeping the secret of where she came from. The colonies are moving towards a war that she knows the outcome of, and the family she has built in the eighteenth century is caught between the side it belongs to and what is coming.
Rating coming soonClaire Randall has kept her secrets for twenty years, and she is returning to Scotland with her grown daughter to tell the truth about them. What she has to explain involves the Jacobite rising, the Battle of Culloden and the husband she left behind in the eighteenth century, and her daughter has never been told any of it.
Rating coming soonTorak is twelve and living in the forest with his father in the Stone Age when a bear possessed by something evil kills the man and leaves the boy alone. He is joined by an orphaned wolf cub, and the two of them have to travel north to find help before the same creature finds them again.
Rating coming soonIn Connecticut in 1666 an ancient spirit wakes in the woods, and the settlers who live near it have a name for him and a use for it. To Abitha, a young widow who is being squeezed out of the land her husband left her, he is the one thing in the colony that is not pretending to be respectable.
Rating coming soonEvelyn Cyril Gordon has just been discharged from a war in Southeast Asia and has no idea what to do next. Answering a newspaper advertisement that asks whether he is a coward takes him to a woman called Star, to a quest for the Egg of the Phoenix, and to a road that leaves this universe behind.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter is returned to Mars after ten years away and lands in the Valley Dor, the Barsoomian afterlife from which nobody is supposed to leave. With his friend Tars Tarkas he discovers that the white-skinned Therns have built their power on a lie about the pilgrimage, and that Dejah Thoris has vanished. Together they save Thuvia, a slave girl held by the Therns, and are caught up in an attack on the Therns by the Black Pirates of Barsoom.
Rating coming soonYoung Kindan expects little from his life until the people of Pern discover what the watch-whers, distant relatives of the dragons, can actually do. The beasts can warn miners about gas in the seams they are digging and find men trapped after a cave-in, and the work of putting them to use begins in the camp where Kindan is growing up.
Rating coming soonThe Spook and his apprentice, Thomas Ward, are the people a county calls when it needs a witch, a ghost or a boggart dealt with. Their work takes them to the cathedral town of Priestown, where something the Spook has never been able to defeat is waiting in the catacombs, and where the arrival of a witch-hunting Quisitor gives them a second enemy.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard, and the work is mostly ghosts, vampires and werewolves, in no particular order. This time he is hunting a bewildered and dangerous spirit through a hospital with a Knight of the Cross beside him, and the invitation he has just been handed is to a party held by the vampire court, which is not the kind of invitation a sensible man accepts.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is fifteen and the only witch on the Chalk, where the work is unglamorous and consists mostly of looking after people who need it. Then the old Baron, whom she had been nursing, dies of poor health, and the neighbourhood decides that the young witch must have had something to do with it. Suspicion of that kind is hard to argue with.
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