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 13 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonIn a country where an industrial revolution runs on magic, a student of archaeology finds a book that is awake and aware, and that has been gathering information for a very long time. In another land, a dyer's daughter discovers she has a talent that her religion tells her is a form of theft.
Rating coming soonOld Gregory has been the Spook for the county for years, clearing the villages of boggarts, ghosts and witches, and his time is coming to an end. Twenty-nine apprentices have tried and none has lasted; the last hope is a twelve-year-old farm boy who can see the things other people cannot.
Rating coming soonA Celtic warlord was murdered before he could marry the woman he loved, and he has been reborn again and again since, each time without any memory of the lives before. She has been waiting for him through all of it, and when they meet again he does not know her.
Rating coming soonWill has finished his apprenticeship and is now a Ranger with a fief of his own, which turns out to be less peaceful than it looked. When the Skandians appear he has to deal with them, and then he is sent on a secret mission with his friend Alyss, into a country frightened of sorcery. Nobody there is sure who can be trusted.
Rating coming soonFor centuries the Others and human beings have lived side by side in an uneasy peace, and when humankind oversteps its bounds the Others have to decide how much of humanity they are prepared to tolerate. Since they allied themselves with the blood prophets, the arrangement has changed. It is the delicate balance between the two peoples that this book is about.
Rating coming soonAfter a human uprising was put down by the Elders, the few cities still under human control are far apart and the land beyond them is feared. Lakeside Courtyard came through the fighting more or less intact, and its leaders have to work with the humans who remain. The peace is fragile, and the people keeping it are few.
Rating coming soonA young Irish woman called Brida has been interested in magic for as long as she can remember, and what she is looking for now is something the books she has read cannot give her. Her search brings her to two teachers, a wise man who lives in a forest and a woman who knows how to dance to the music of the world.
Rating coming soonSebastian Wroth was turned into a vampire against his will centuries ago, and he has been alone with his hatred of what he has become ever since. A woman comes to kill him, and what she does instead saves him, which is not what either of them had planned. Neither of them expected to meet somebody worth keeping.
Rating coming soonIn the underworld of Melbourne there is a nightclub for every taste, and one of them has become an obsession for Riley Jenson, a rare hybrid of vampire and werewolf who works as a guardian. She is not there for pleasure but for a killer using the club as hunting ground. The club is the only way in.
Rating coming soonThree wives of the immortal Armand Argeneau have died in ways that were neither natural nor timely, and a legend has grown up around him because of it. An enforcer is sent to find out whether he is a lover or a murderer, and she does not intend to be charmed. She does not put much faith in legends.
Rating coming soonNicole Phillips hires a housekeeper and gets a tall, dark and very good looking man named Jake Colson instead. He turns out to be indispensable in the kitchen and everywhere else, and he also turns out not to be mortal, which is a complication neither of them planned on. Nobody in the story is quite what they appear to be.
Rating coming soonBasha Argeneau would rather hide out in southern California than face the family she left behind, and she has been doing it successfully with a travelling carnival. Then an immortal in black arrives with orders to bring her back for questioning, and she has no intention of going. She can hear what he is thinking, and he knows it.
Rating coming soonCarolyn Connor has come to St Lucia to get away from a marriage she has just escaped, and she has made a vow not to think about men while she is there. Then she meets a woman who is famous in her family for arranging matches, and the holiday stops going according to plan.
Rating coming soonDante Notte has been run over by a motorhome, which is not how he expected to meet the woman he is supposed to spend the rest of his life with. He has a punctured lung, broken ribs, a brother to rescue and pursuers to keep away, and she is a stranger who has just become involved.
Rating coming soonA single mother takes her son into a shop called Dixie's Vampire Emporium to let him browse, and finds herself talking to the assistant, a man with a dark-eyed charm and an English accent that makes her heart skip. What she does not know is that he is not entirely a stranger.
Rating coming soonZoey comes to an island off the coast of South Carolina to claim her dead mother's apartment in an old cobblestone building called the Dellawisp. What she finds there is a group of secretive neighbours and a set of stories that are still being written. The little birds of the island are as much at home as the people.
Rating coming soonRiley Jenson works for an organisation created to police the supernatural races, and she trusts her superiors about as much as she trusts her enemies. Her latest job is to get inside the heavily guarded palace of a criminal who has been experimenting on the gene pool for decades. There is more than one kind of trap in the building.
Rating coming soonTen years ago a girl was orphaned when an Earth Master had her parents killed by the werewolves he had made, and she was saved by a Fire Master of the Woodsman's Lodge. Now another pack is ravaging Exmoor, and she has come to London to help deal with it. Both hunts lead to the same place.
Rating coming soonDru Anderson has lost her parents, her best friend is a werewolf, and she has just learned that the blood in her veins is not entirely human. Now she is at a school for teenagers like her, and she is the only girl in the place. The school has its own rules and its own dangers.
Rating coming soonPrincess Annie is the younger sister of the princess who is destined to be Sleeping Beauty, and when the whole castle falls asleep it is Annie who stays awake. She is the only person who can go beyond the hedge to look for help, because magic does not work on her. Being immune to magic has its uses.
Rating coming soonPrincess Emeralda is not a model princess: her laugh is like a donkey's bray, she trips over her own feet and she has no interest in the prince her mother wants her to marry. When she is persuaded to kiss a frog, the spell goes the wrong way and she turns into a frog herself.
Rating coming soonA man comes back to the town he grew up in for a funeral and finds himself at the farm at the end of the lane, where he remembers a girl called Lettie Hempstock, who had told him that the pond behind her house was an ocean. The past he had forgotten comes back to him there.
Rating coming soonMatt Cruse is fourteen and works as a cabin boy on a passenger airship that crosses the ocean held up by a gas called hydrium. One night on lookout duty he spots a damaged balloon and saves the man in it, who dies aboard talking about creatures nobody believes in. Nobody believes him at first.
Rating coming soonSophronia would rather take clocks apart and climb trees than learn how to behave in company, and her mother is desperate for her to become a proper lady. So she is sent to a finishing academy for young ladies of quality, which turns out to be something else. The lessons are not the ones her mother had in mind.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson gets an urgent call from his friend Grover and sets out at once, with his friends and his sword, to find out what has happened. What the demigods find is that a goddess and one of their own have been taken. The army they are up against is not a small one.
Rating coming soonTwo children go to stay with a grandfather they hardly know, and find that his house and the grounds around it are not what they appear to be. The estate is a refuge for magical creatures, and there are rules about what the children may do there. The rules are there for a reason.
Rating coming soonConor is thirteen and his mother is dying of cancer, and at night a monster comes to the house and tells him stories. What the monster wants is the truth that Conor will not say out loud, and it is not interested in being a comfort. Conor has been dealing with all of it on his own.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is eleven years old and she is learning how to be a witch. She leaves the chalk country where she grew up to serve as apprentice and maid to an elderly witch called Miss Level, and finds that her new teacher has two bodies and a spirit who does the housework. Something that cannot be seen and cannot be killed has followed her there and wants her mind, and the work of a witch does not stop because of it.
Rating coming soonA family of vampires from Uberwald is invited to the naming of a royal baby, and the witches of Lancre find that the vampires have trained themselves out of their weaknesses. They wear bright clothes, drink wine and stay up until noon. The witches of Lancre are the ones who have to answer them.
Rating coming soonThe Night Watch has two problems: murders that appear to have been committed by a golem, and the poisoning of the Patrician, which nobody can work out how anyone managed. Several of the city's golems have gone missing as well, and none of it fits together at all. Every answer the Watch finds leads to another question.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is nine, and she thinks her grandmother, a shepherd, may have been a witch. When something begins taking children from the countryside, Tiffany has to deal with it, with the help of a very small and very violent people. She has never been taught anything about witchcraft, and she has to begin somewhere.
Rating coming soonGranny Weatherwax and her small coven come home to Lancre and find crop circles in the fields, which means that the boundaries between worlds are thin. What comes through them is the elves, and the elves are not the charming creatures of stories. The answer to them is not a magical one.
Rating coming soonAgnes Nitt leaves Lancre to look for a career at the Opera House in Ankh-Morpork, and the witches follow when Granny Weatherwax realises that Nanny Ogg has not been paid for her very popular cookbook. What they walk into is a story rather like The Phantom of the Opera, and the witches are not sentimental about opera.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is running her own steading and looking after the people of the Chalk when the question of who holds the ground comes up again. The Kelda of the Nac Mac Feegle has something worrying her, and there is work for a witch to do. It is the last of the books in the series.
Rating coming soonGaladriel Higgins is a sorceress at a school of black magic where the pupils are in danger of being eaten before they can graduate. She has spent her whole time there suppressing what she can do, and now she has to get through her final year. She has to decide what to do with what she can do.
Rating coming soonSomething malevolent has been hiding in a park in a town in Illinois for years, and a man named John Ross is drawn there by nightmares that warn him a great evil is about to be released. A teenager with powers she does not understand is caught up in it, and the two of them have to work together.
Rating coming soonEvery night the corelings rise out of the ground and take on form: sand demons, wood demons, wind demons, flame demons. The only thing that keeps people alive is the ancient and half-forgotten system of wards, and the time has come to stand against the night. The first of the five books is where the story begins.
Rating coming soonThe sun is going down on humanity and the night belongs to the demons, and the population that is left has to hide behind symbols of power it no longer entirely understands. This is the second book of the series in which that situation is being changed. The demons come up as the sun goes down.
Rating coming soonOn the night of the new moon the demons rise in force, and what they are looking for is two men, either of whom might turn out to be the Deliverer of prophecy. The scattered remains of humanity are waiting to see which of them it is. The two of them have been waiting for this night as well.
Rating coming soonFor as long as anyone can remember, the demons have come up out of the ground at night and hunted human beings down to a few scattered settlements. This is the book in which the story that began with The Warded Man is brought to an end. The reckoning with that place is what the book is for.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl has put his whole fortune into a project that he believes will save the planet and everybody on it, human and fairy alike. It is not the sort of thing he usually does, and the people who know him are suspicious. What has happened to Artemis is the puzzle the book sets up.
Rating coming soonNesta Archeron is proud, quick to anger and slow to forgive, and since the war she has been unable to find a way to live with what she has seen. The novel follows her rather than her sister Feyre, and it is her account of getting through it. She has been difficult to live with since the war.
Rating coming soonSmash knew all about ogres, having a human mother and being one himself: they are huge and horribly ugly, and they are also generally agreed to be so stupid that there is very little they can be trusted with. Smash is not quite either. He is an ogre with a human mother.
Rating coming soonPenelope is sent to convalesce at her aunt's farmhouse in Derbyshire, and while she is there she finds herself slipping back into the 1580s. What she witnesses there is an attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, from her imprisonment. It is the scheme that history remembers as the Babington Plot.
Rating coming soonIn 1804 a Royal Navy captain takes a French frigate and finds a dragon's egg among the prizes. It hatches on his ship, and the creature that comes out of it decides that he is its handler, which ends his career at sea and puts him in the Aerial Corps instead. The two of them have to be trained in time for a war that is already underway.
Rating coming soonThe companions who freed the refugees of Pax Tharkas are sent to find them a permanent home, and the city they travel to is destroyed by dragons while they are standing in it. The party is split between two escapes, and each half has to work out what it is fighting for. The war for Krynn is going badly, and winter is closing in.
Rating coming soonFive friends meet again after years apart and find that the world they left has changed: dragons have come back, the gods have withdrawn and the armies of a Highlord are taking the continent apart. The companions are carrying something that the soldiers want, and they do not yet know what it is for or who they can take it to.
Rating coming soonThe war has moved to the sea. Tanis Half-Elven comes back to his friends after time spent in the company of the enemy and does not tell them everything that happened, and the companions take ship out of the port of Flotsam. Aboard is a helmsman with a history of his own, and behind them the Dragonarmies are recovering from their defeat at the High Clerist's Tower.
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