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 12 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonAzaro is an abiku, a spirit child, living in an unnamed African city, and he is able to move between the spirit world and the world of people. The novel follows him and his family through poverty and political upheaval, with the two worlds running alongside each other rather than one being a figure for the other.
Rating coming soonIn 1687 sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler leaves Barbados after her grandfather dies and goes to live with her aunt's family in the Puritan community of Wethersfield, Connecticut. She finds the colony cold and narrow, and the only place she feels free is the meadow where she talks to an old Quaker woman the neighbours call a witch.
Rating coming soonWhen her little brother seems to be taken over by an evil spirit, fourteen-year-old Laura Chant goes for help to the older boy at school she is convinced has supernatural powers. What she asks for is a changeover: a deliberate move from one kind of life to another, which she has to be willing to make.
Rating coming soonThe witch Desiderata Hollow dies and leaves her magic wand to Magrat Garlick, who thereby becomes the fairy godmother of a young woman called Emberella in the distant city of Genua. Magrat and her fellow witches have to travel there to stop Emberella being married off to a man who is not what he appears.
Rating coming soonNorman Saylor, a professor at a small American college, considers magic to be superstition. Then he discovers that his wife is a practising sorceress, and he still refuses to accept what he has learned: that among women magic is an open secret, that it is being used against him, and that the occult warfare behind ordinary academic life is a matter of life and death.
Rating coming soonGeillis Ramsey has had a lonely childhood, made lonelier by a mother's cousin who taught her to see the world in an unusual way. When she grows up she inherits her cousin's house, along with her reputation in the neighbourhood as a white witch and an herbalist, and finds both the house and the community stranger than she expected.
Rating coming soonRiley Jenson is a rare hybrid of vampire and werewolf, and she works for Melbourne's Directorate of Other Races, which polices the supernatural and protects humans from it. Her twin brother Rhoan is a field guardian; she is an office worker, until he goes missing on a mission and she has to look for him herself.
Rating coming soonMacKayla Lane thought she and her sister were ordinary southern girls until she learned that they descend from a Celtic bloodline of sidhe-seers who can see the Fae. Her sister was found dead in a Dublin alley, and Mac has come to Ireland for answers and for revenge, which she now believes she has the power to take.
Rating coming soonMr Ash is quiet, tall, unfailingly kind and the last survivor of an ancient species called the Taltos, living among humans as he always has and running a great corporate empire. He learns from an old friend that another Taltos has been seen in the Scottish glen where, long before the Romans came, he ruled his clan.
Rating coming soonUilleam MacRieve believed he had put the ghosts of his boyhood to rest, until a brutal torture revives them and destroys his Lykae instinct, leaving him craving death. Chloe Todd is a young human seized for an auction block and forced into a world of monsters, and when she is offered up to the immortals she becomes the person who pulls him back.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse is at work at Merlotte's bar when it is firebombed, and because her employer Sam Merlotte is known to be two-natured, suspicion falls on the people who dislike shifters. Sookie suspects something else, and she is also caught up in a plot by her lover Eric and his vampire child Pam against the vampire who rules them.
Rating coming soonLizzy Tucker has inherited a historic house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and taken a job as a pastry chef at a bakery in Salem, and she is looking forward to an ordinary life. Then two strangers appear in the shop, and both of them want the Stones of SALIGIA, seven stones that represent the seven deadly sins and grant enormous power.
Rating coming soonTommy Flood wakes up after the best night of his life to find that his girlfriend Jody is a vampire, and that she has made him one too. The two of them decide to work through it together, which means learning what he can do, finding someone to run errands in daylight, and dealing with everyone in San Francisco who wants them gone.
Rating coming soonA vampire serial killer sends Anita Blake a grisly souvenir from Las Vegas, and she has to warn the local authorities what they are dealing with. The situation turns out to be worse than she thought: ten police officers and an executioner have already been killed, and Anita travels to Nevada with three other federal marshals to work the case.
Rating coming soonNathan Byrn is running again, and the Alliance of Free Witches has been all but destroyed by the Council's Hunters. To save the rebellion the Alliance needs the missing half of an ancient amulet that makes its bearer invincible in battle, and its guardian, the reclusive witch Ledger, has her own reasons for not parting with it.
Rating coming soonJean Honeychurch has been called Jinx since childhood, and misfortune does seem to follow her wherever she goes, including to New York City, where she has moved to escape a mess she caused at home. Her aunt and uncle take her in, her beautiful cousin Tory does not welcome her, and Tory is hiding something dangerous of her own.
Rating coming soonThe night creatures of Cincinnati dislike Rachel Morgan, a witch and bounty hunter whose new reputation for dark magic attracts the attention of humans and the undead alike. A mortal lover who left her has come back haunted by his past, and there are others who want what he is carrying badly enough to destroy the Hollows to get it.
Rating coming soonA colony ship brought its passengers to a new world, and its crew used the technology they carried to make themselves immortal, powerful and, to the generations born planetside, divine. The former crew rule as the gods of the Hindu pantheon, complete with reincarnation by mind transfer and a caste system beneath them. Sam, who taught the colonists to think about their own condition, is not willing to leave it there.
Rating coming soonTiamat is an ocean world linked to the rest of the galaxy by a wormhole that closes for a century and a half at a time, and the gate is about to shut. The planet rules itself through a hereditary queen whose successor is chosen when she dies, and this time the choice has gone wrong in a way that matters to the Hegemony as much as to Tiamat.
Rating coming soonMarra is the third daughter of a royal house, raised in a convent while her eldest sister was married to a prince and died, and her second sister was married to the same man in her place. When Marra learns what is happening to her sister, she leaves the convent, and the dust-wife who can help her sets three impossible tasks as the price of that help.
Rating coming soonJohn Drinkwater, an architect at the turn of the twentieth century, comes to believe that the world contains another world, and another inside that, all the way to the realm of the fairies his English wife can see and speak with. He builds a house called Edgewood, a composite of many styles, and the generations of his family live in it, close to a door that leads outward.
Rating coming soonMori Phelps is fifteen, Welsh, and newly sent to an English boarding school after a summer in which her twin sister was killed. She walks with a cane, she has a mother she does not trust, and the things she relies on are the science fiction novels she reads and the fairies she has known since she was a child in an industrial town in the valleys.
Rating coming soonDashti is a mucker from the steppes who takes a position as maid to Lady Saren just as Saren is walled up in a tower for refusing to marry the man her father chose for her. The two of them are shut in for seven years unless Saren gives way, and when Saren will not speak to the man she loves, Dashti is ordered to pretend to be her.
Rating coming soonThe Stillness is a supercontinent that suffers a catastrophic season every few centuries, and the last one may be the end of the world. Essun, an orogene able to move the earth, has found shelter but not her daughter, and what she is offered instead is a request from Alabaster Tenring, the man who broke the world, at a price that would settle the fate of everyone.
Rating coming soonThe Moon is coming back, and whether that means the end of humanity or something worse depends on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring and hopes to find her daughter and make a world in which orogene children can grow up safe. Nassun has seen what the world does and has drawn her own conclusions about it.
Rating coming soonNew York is a city that has become conscious, and its avatar has fallen into a coma and vanished. Five new avatars, one for each borough, are waking up instead: a graduate student who steps off a train without his memory, a gallery director in the Bronx, a politician in Brooklyn and others, and all of them have the same enemy.
Rating coming soonIsta, the dowager royina of Chalion, was blamed by everyone including herself for the destruction her family suffered, and she has spent years being watched by guardians who believe she is not entirely sane. Restless and bored, she slips away on a pilgrimage with a small escort, and finds that a god has taken an interest in where she is going.
Rating coming soonMartin the Warrior is helping to build Redwall Abbey when a travelling hedgehog sings a song that names his father, Luke, whom he has not seen since he was a child. Martin sets out for the northern shore to find out what became of him, and what waits for him there is the record of a long pursuit across the sea.
Rating coming soonThree women of the same family live centuries apart. In 1619 Altha is on trial for witchcraft after a local man dies. In 1942 Violet would rather study insects and climb trees than become a young lady. In 2019 Kate leaves London for a cottage in Cumbria that a great-aunt has left her, and finds that the house has secrets of its own.
Rating coming soonThe warrior Clans are about to be attacked by an army that has been gathering in the Dark Forest for a long time, and the fourth cat named in an old prophecy has still not appeared. Three young warriors prepare to lead their Clanmates into the battle, and the fate of every clan depends on whether the fourth arrives in time.
Rating coming soonIn modern Moscow there are the Others, people with supernatural powers who have taken sides in a very old conflict between the Light and the Dark. A truce has held the balance between them for a thousand years, but a prophecy says that one Other will arrive who can tip it, and when a boy with unusual abilities appears the two sides begin to compete for him.
Rating coming soonThe four Clans of warrior cats have reached the lake that is to be their new home, and now they have to divide it up, learn its dangers and find a place where they can speak with StarClan. More than one cat has plans of their own for the new territory, and the threats inside the Clans begin to look worse than the ones in the forest.
Rating coming soonPeter Grant is a police constable and an apprentice magician, working out of a unit in London that deals with the cases nobody else can put a name to. A road accident in Crawley turns up human blood in the car, and enquiries from that lead to a shallow grave, another body and a suspect with an education in magic that he was never supposed to have.
Rating coming soonThronos, prince of Skye Hall, loved Lanthe when they were children, before their families' war caught the two of them in the middle of it and left them enemies. Centuries later he is a warlord carrying a blood vendetta against her, and she is a sorceress trying to recover powers she has lost, and he is hunting her without knowing what reaching her will cost him.
Rating coming soonJaime Vegas is a medium who can genuinely speak to the dead, unlike most of the spiritualists she works alongside, and she has spent her career hiding the fact. She joins a television production in which three mediums are shut in a house to raise the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, and discovers something in the garden that will not leave her alone until it has been heard.
Rating coming soonTheodosia Throckmorton is eleven and spends her time in the London museum where her parents work, removing curses from the Egyptian objects that come into the collection. When her mother sends a crate home from Egypt containing a statue with a dangerous curse on it, Theodosia finds herself hunted by two secret societies, one that wants the statue protected and one that wants to use it.
Rating coming soonA demon wakes in the land of Corona, gathers goblins and giants to it, and begins to destroy the settlements on the frontier. Its first attacks leave two children from the same small village orphaned, and one of them, Elbryan, is taken in by elves and raised as a ranger while the other, his friend Pony, loses her past to what she has seen.
Rating coming soonMatt Ewing's business is failing and he would try almost anything to save it, including collecting lucky pennies, so when a beautiful woman appears out of the bottle he has been carrying around he assumes his luck has turned. Eden has been inside that bottle for two thousand years and is pleased to help, which is a problem, because her magic has gone rusty.
Rating coming soonEvadne Gray is a fencer with no interest in society and no knowledge of diabolism when she is sent to London to chaperone her younger sister, who wants to be an art critic. Within a short time her sister falls in with the charismatic Lady Henrietta Wotton, and Evadne enrols in a fencing school whose master turns out to be engaged in a war with demons.
Rating coming soonNimira dances for a living in a foreign city, having lost her mother and her father, and she does not hesitate when a mysterious magician offers her a place in his house and a performance to give. The performance is with an automaton that plays only when a silver key is turned, and the machine turns out not to be a machine.
Rating coming soonMakeda and Abby were born conjoined, daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, and were separated by surgery when they were small. Abby has the family's magic and Makeda does not, and the two sisters, now adults, are growing apart, which is why Makeda decides to move out and try to live as an ordinary person.
Rating coming soonPerdita Lee looks like an ordinary schoolgirl in London and her mother Harriet looks like an ordinary working mother, which is not quite the case for either of them. Their family keeps a recipe for gingerbread that hardly anybody in London appreciates and that is very well known indeed in Harriet's home country, which most accounts say does not exist.
Rating coming soonCapac Raimi arrives in the City with no memory of anything before he stepped off the train. He is quick and confident and intends to make his fortune there, and the City rewards that kind of ambition, being a place of assassins, blind priests and a kingpin who runs his business with puppets, all of it under the eye of a man known as the Cardinal.
Rating coming soonVictor and Eli were college roommates, both of them brilliant and arrogant and lonely, and both of them recognised the same quality in the other. In their final year they began investigating whether a near-death experience could produce extraordinary abilities, and when the theory moved from the seminar room into practice, it went very badly wrong.
Rating coming soonDiscworld's Death has developed a personality, which the Auditors of Reality regard as a defect in the machinery, so they arrange for him to retire and hand him a timer with a fixed amount of sand in it. What nobody has allowed for is the effect on the world of taking away the person whose job it is to be there when it is somebody's time.
Rating coming soonA murder inside ThunderClan has split the Clan apart, and the cats who have taken it upon themselves to find out who was responsible are the three young warriors at the centre of the prophecy: Jayfeather, Hollyleaf and Lionblaze. Each of them is looking for something different, and one of them is about to learn something about their own parentage.
Rating coming soonPrudence Barnett is an overachiever with strong opinions about the people around her, and after a night out she wakes up able to make bad behaviour come back on the person who did it. The power works on almost everyone in her coastal town, with one stubborn exception: her lab partner, Quint Erickson.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse has been betrayed by the vampire she had been with for years, and she is trying to work out what to do about the new man in her life when she is drawn into a summit of the vampire states, held in a hotel with a great deal of politics going on behind the doors.
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