Primary genre

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 8 of the shelf.

685 books241 series70 tagged

Browse the shelf All books

The fantasy shelf

Search by title or author, filter with the subgenre chips, the primary-genre chips or the tag chips, or sort the list. Filtering happens in your browser and nothing about the visit is stored.

Search Fantasy books

Sort

Subgenre

Primary genre

Tag

Showing 48 of 685 books

Reckless

Lauren Roberts · 2024

Paedyn survived the Purging Trials, killed the king and set the country alight. Now she is running, and the person chasing her is Kai Azer, the young king's new Enforcer and the one she would rather not be running from. His orders are straightforward: find her, bring her back, do what the crown requires. The trail takes them across the Scorches and into Dor, a city with no Elites left and no reason to respect either of them. The second Powerless novel keeps the hunter and the hunted moving in the same direction and lets the distance between duty and what they want shrink to nothing.

Fantasy romanceEpic fantasy

Red Queen

Victoria Aveyard · 2015

Mare Barrow's world is divided by blood, into those with red blood and those with silver. Mare's family are Reds, conscripted into service for the Silver elite, whose supernatural abilities make them close to gods. When her best friend is conscripted into the army she gambles everything to win his freedom, and a twist of fate takes her to the royal palace, where she discovers she has a power of her own.

Young adult fantasyDystopian

Redwall

Brian Jacques · 1986

Redwall 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.

Classic fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Return to Summerhouse

Jude Deveraux · 2008

Three women come to a summerhouse in Maine where Madame Zoya grants her visitors their innermost wishes. Amy hides a loss behind a perfect marriage, Faith is a widow still grieving a man from long ago, and Zoe is an artist shunned by her town after a night she cannot remember. Zoya and her sister intend to send them back to eighteenth-century England, to alter Amy's ancestry.

Time travelContemporary romance

Rising Storm

Erin Hunter · 2004

Tigerclaw has been driven out of ThunderClan, but Fireheart cannot shake the sense that he is still out there in the forest waiting for a chance to strike. As the new deputy he has to hold the Clan together through a hot summer, with the leader still shattered and an apprentice carrying a secret.

Young adult fantasyAdventure fiction

Roadmarks

Roger Zelazny · 1979

There is a road that runs through time, with an exit at every year and at every history that might have been, and only a small number of people can find it. Red Dorakeen has been travelling it for a long time, supplying weapons to the Athenians at Marathon and trying to restore a version of the past he half remembers, because somewhere off the road is a place he can no longer reach. He is also being hunted by a series of assassins, each of them with reasons of their own.

Science fantasyTime travel

Rose Daughter

Robin McKinley · 1997

A merchant loses his fortune with his ships at sea and takes his three daughters to Rose Cottage, a country house that was left to his youngest, Beauty, and so cannot be seized by his creditors. The garden turns out to be full of roses, and a single rose picked at a strange castle brings the anger of its owner down on the family.

Fairytale retellingYoung adult fantasy

Rose Madder

Stephen King · 1995

Rosie Daniels leaves her husband after fourteen years of an abusive marriage. A beating while she was four months pregnant had caused her to miscarry their only child, and the man she is running from is a police officer who specialises in finding missing people. She escapes to a distant city to build a new life and new relationships, while Norman Daniels uses his professional contacts to track her down.

Psychological horrorModern horror

Ruby the Red Fairy

Daisy Meadows · 2003

Fairyland is kept bright by seven sisters, the Rainbow Fairies, until Jack Frost sends them away and the colour starts to go out of the place. Rachel and Kirsty find Ruby the Red Fairy in the pot at the end of a rainbow and set out to help her find the other six.

Fairytale retellingComing-of-age

Ruinsong

Julia Ember · 2020

In a world where magic is sung, Cadence is a powerful mage forced by her queen to torture the disgraced nobility of her country. Her voice is both her prison and her weapon, and the arrival of a childhood friend tied to the underground rebellion leaves her choosing between obedience and turning on the crown.

Dark fantasyYoung adult fantasyQueer romance

Rule of Wolves

Leigh Bardugo · 2021

Fjerda's army is preparing to invade, and Nikolai Lantsov will need all of his ingenuity and charm, and the monster he keeps hidden, to win the fight. Zoya Nazyalensky has lost too much to war already: she watched her mentor die and her worst enemy come back, and she will not bury another friend. In Shu Han a blot of darkness resembling the Shadow Fold is spreading past the Unsea, and the final novel of the King of Scars duology follows the five people whose choices decide what happens.

Young adult fantasyEpic fantasy

Runaway Vampire

Lynsay Sands · 2001

Dante 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.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Running with the Demon

Terry Brooks · 1997

Something 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.

Dark fantasyModern horror

Ruthless Vows

Rebecca Ross · 2023

Iris comes home from the front with injuries and no idea where Roman is. Behind enemy lines, Roman has lost his memory and is writing for the other side, piecing together who he used to be by putting words on paper for a government he does not remember choosing. A letter arrives under his door, from an author who is familiar in a way he cannot place. The second Letters of Enchantment book keeps the two of them on opposite sides of the same war, with only the typewriters between them, each one writing towards somebody who may not be there when the fighting stops.

Historical fantasyFantasy romance

Sabriel

Garth Nix · 1995

Sabriel 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.

Witch and magicYoung adult fantasyDark fantasy

Sea of Swords

R. A. Salvatore · 2001

The warhammer Aegis-fang has ended up in the hands of the pirate captain Sheila Kree, and Wulfgar is following her. When Drizzt Do'Urden and his companions leave Mithral Hall in search of Wulfgar, they find themselves on the trail of the hammer as well, a path that will lead them to a reunion and to the last battle for the heart and soul of their friend.

Epic fantasyAdventure fiction

Season of Storms

Andrzej Sapkowski · 2013

Geralt of Rivia kills a monster that was made to slaughter people, and within days he is under arrest, his two witcher swords are gone and he has made a powerful enemy. Getting them back means dealing with a sorceress, the authorities and a great deal of rumour. The novel stands on its own in the middle of the Witcher series.

Sword and sorceryEpic fantasy

Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary

Brandon Mull · 2009

Two of the five hidden artifacts that open the great demon prison have been found, and the Society of the Evening Star is destroying one preserve after another as it hunts for the others. Reading Patton's Journal of Secrets, Kendra learns where the key to the vault holding a further artifact is kept, which sends the Knights of the Dawn into a dragon sanctuary called Wyrmroost.

Young adult fantasyDragon fantasy

Seeing Redd

Frank Beddor · 2007

Alyss is Queen of Wonderland, and the people who prefer chaos to peace are already trying to destroy what she has built. Between the demands of government and a Royal Bodyguard who follows her everywhere, she has very little privacy. Then a series of phantom sightings convinces everyone that her aunt Redd has returned.

Fairytale retellingPortal fantasy

Serpent & Dove

Shelby Mahurin · 2019

Louise Le Blanc ran from her coven two years ago and survives in the city of Cesarine by stealing whatever she can and using no magic at all, because witches in Cesarine are hunted, feared and burned. Reid Diggory is a Chasseur sworn to the Church, and his life has been built on one rule: a witch does not get to live. Neither of them meant to meet. One badly chosen stunt leaves the two of them bound to each other in a marriage the Church cannot easily undo, in a city where Lou's real enemies are already looking for her. The first Serpent & Dove novel puts a witch and a witch hunter in the same house and lets the arithmetic do the rest.

Witch and magicHistorical fantasy

Servant of the Bones

Anne Rice · 1996

Azriel 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.

Occult and possessionHistorical horror

Shadow and Bone

Leigh Bardugo · 2012

Alina 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.

Young adult fantasyWitch and magicDark fantasy

Shadow Games

Glen Cook · 1989

After the defeat of the Dominator, the Black Company is down to seven men, and they march south in search of the place their annals say they belong. On the way they are hired again, this time by the crown prince of Taglios, whose commission is to stop the advance of the Shadowmasters before his city is swallowed like the ones behind them.

GrimdarkEpic fantasy

Shadow of Night

Deborah Harkness · 2012

Diana Bishop is a historian from a family of witches, and Matthew Clairmont is a vampire who has been alive for centuries. They are looking for a manuscript whose contents could explain what they are. To find it they travel back to Elizabethan London, where Matthew's old acquaintances are waiting and where a woman who is not supposed to practise magic needs to be taught how.

Historical fantasyWitch and magic

Shadow Souls

L. J. Smith · 2010

Elena Gilbert's love, the vampire Stefan Salvatore, has been captured and imprisoned by demonic spirits who are causing havoc in the town of Fell's Church. To find him she entrusts her life to Stefan's brother Damon, a deadly vampire who wants Elena body and soul, and the two of them set out for the slums of the Dark Dimension, where Stefan is being held.

Vampire romanceYoung adult fantasy

Shadow Spell

Nora Roberts · 2014

Connor O'Dwyer is a falconer in County Mayo who takes visitors on hawk walks across the countryside, and Meara Quinn, his sister's best friend, guides the same visitors on horseback. They have known each other their whole lives, and Connor has never thought about her any differently until a brush with death changes the arrangement. Meara does not want to lose the friendship, or herself, to something more.

Paranormal romanceWitch and magic

Shadows Linger

Glen Cook · 1984

The Black Company's latest employer is the Lady, who once helped her husband the Dominator build an empire of legendary evil and was imprisoned with him in the Barrowlands before a foolish wizard was tricked into setting her free. The company is ordered to march thousands of miles across her empire to the Barrowland. In the city it passes through, a small detachment of the company discovers that the mute girl it has rescued and sheltered is the White Rose, and decides to protect her from the mercenaries who are out to destroy her.

GrimdarkEpic fantasy

She

H. Rider Haggard · 1887

An 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.

Classic adventureExploration fiction

Ship of Destiny

Robin Hobb · 2001

Much of Bingtown has been destroyed since the night the Satrap disappeared, and the factions inside it are fighting one another even while they hold off an invasion from Chalced. Ronica Vestrit has concluded that the town must change if it is to survive at all, and that it has to bring the Old Traders, the New Traders, the Three Ships folk and the freed tattooed slaves together into one people.

Epic fantasyNaval adventure

Shiver

Maggie Stiefvater · 2009

For years Grace has watched the wolves that live in the woods behind the house, and she has been drawn to one of them in particular: a yellow-eyed wolf who watches her back with an attention of his own. Then a local boy is killed by wolves and the town's hunters go into the woods after the pack.

Paranormal romanceYoung adult fantasyWilderness adventure

Siege and Storm

Leigh Bardugo · 2013

Alina and Mal have crossed the sea to get away from Ravka and are trying to live quietly in a country where nobody knows her, because Alina is the Sun Summoner and half the world is looking for her. The Darkling has not finished with either of them. It is the second book of the trilogy, and it moves between the sea and the capital Alina left behind.

Young adult fantasyDark fantasy

Silver Borne

Patricia Briggs · 2010

Mercy Thompson, a mechanic and shapeshifter, tries to return a powerful Fae book she borrowed in desperation and finds the bookshop locked and closed. The book contains knowledge the Fae will do a great deal to keep hidden, and at the same time her friend Samuel is struggling with his wolf side, leaving Mercy to cover for him.

Urban fantasyFae and faerie

Sister Mine

Nalo Hopkinson · 2013

Makeda 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.

Urban fantasyMagical realism

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo · 2015

Kaz Brekker runs the Dregs in Ketterdam, a city where everything is for sale, and he has a reputation for doing the jobs nobody else will at a price nobody else can. A merchant offers him a fortune to break a scientist out of the most secure prison in the world, which is why Kaz takes it. He picks a crew of six that includes a spy, a sharpshooter, a convict with a grudge, a Grisha healer and a runaway, and none of them trusts any of the others. The target is held in the Ice Court, on an island that no thief has ever robbed, and the plan requires them to pass as people they are not for the length of the trip.

Young adult fantasyGrimdark

Skeleton crew

Stephen King · 1985

This collection holds twenty-two pieces: eighteen short stories, two novellas and two poems. Among them is The Mist, in which a supermarket becomes the last place available to the people trapped inside it when something from outside the world comes through, and the volume is framed by the author's own introduction and closing notes.

Modern horrorWeird fiction

Skin Game

Jim Butcher · 2014

Harry Dresden is living on an island in Lake Michigan with a spirit growing inside his head and a headache that keeps getting worse, which is when Queen Mab informs him that he has a job to do. The job is to help Nicodemus Archleone, one of the people Harry would least like to help, break into a vault belonging to Hades. Harry agrees because of what Mab offers in return, and then spends the rest of the book waiting for the betrayal he knows is coming.

Urban fantasyDark fantasy

Skin Trade

Laurell K. Hamilton · 2009

A 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.

Vampire horrorParanormal romance

Skipping Christmas

John Grisham · 1998

Luther and Nora Krank do the arithmetic on Christmas and do not like the answer, so they decide to skip it. No tree, no rooftop snowman, no Christmas Eve party, and a Caribbean cruise instead. Their neighbours, and the street's annual competition for decorations, have opinions about this, and the Kranks find that opting out is more work than joining in.

Classic fantasy

Skulduggery Pleasant

Derek Landy · 2007

Stephanie's uncle Gordon wrote horror fiction, and when he dies and leaves her his estate she discovers that what he wrote was not invented. Pursued by people who want a key he left behind, she is helped by Skulduggery Pleasant, who is a detective, a magician and, technically, dead. The book is the first of the series and brings the two of them together.

Urban fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Slade House

David Mitchell · 2015

Down an alley beside a pub, through a small iron door in a brick wall, there is a house that is not always there. Those who find it see what they most want to see, including people and places that cannot be real, and the brother and sister who live in it have been waiting a long time for guests.

Ghost storyHaunted houseUrban fantasy

Slewfoot

Brom · 2021

In 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.

Folk horrorHistorical horror

Small Favor

Jim Butcher · 2008

Nobody has tried to kill Harry Dresden for almost a year, and his life has finally begun to settle down; for once the future looks reasonably bright. But the past casts a long shadow, and an old bargain has left him in debt to Mab, the monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe and the Queen of Air and Darkness, who has come to call in her marker. It is a small favour he cannot refuse.

Urban fantasyWitch and magic

Small Gods

Terry Pratchett · 1992

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was an interruption. For Brutha the novice, who is the Chosen One, that means wanting peace and justice and brotherly love while also wanting the Inquisition to stop torturing him. The novel tells the origin of the god Om and his relations with Brutha, and it satirises philosophy, religious institutions and the role of religion in political life.

Cozy fantasyClassic fantasy

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Douglas Adams · 1984

The fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence, which its own publisher describes as a trilogy of four, follows Arthur Dent after his return to a version of Earth. Its title is the message the dolphins left when they departed the planet shortly before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and the book treats that joke as the starting point for a much quieter story.

Science fantasy

Sojourn

R. A. Salvatore · 1991

Drizzt Do'Urden has spent more than forty years in the Underdark and comes to the conclusion that neither he nor anyone near him will be safe while he stays there. He goes up to the surface, where what he is makes him an enemy before he has said anything, and where he finds what he actually is.

Sword and sorceryEpic fantasy

Soldiers Live

Glen Cook · 2000

The Black Company has reached the end of a long campaign. Croaker is an annalist again rather than a captain, Sleepy leads the company, and no member has died in battle for four years. Then old adversaries set out to bring about the Year of the Skulls, and the company is pushed to the edge of destruction.

Dark fantasyGrimdark

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ray Bradbury · 1962

Two 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.

Dark fantasyClassic horrorComing-of-age

Song of Susannah

Stephen King · 2004

Susannah, now pregnant, has another personality taking control of her. The demon-mother Mia uses her and Black Thirteen to travel to New York City in 1999, and Jake, Oy and Pere Callahan have to rescue her while Eddie and Roland travel to Maine in 1977. A vacant lot in New York becomes the object that has to be saved.

Dark fantasyEpic fantasy

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

Who writes about these books

Books editor

Baby Bat

Reader profile

Fantasy books

The fantasy shelf

Reckless

Red Queen

Redwall

Return to Summerhouse

Rising Storm

Roadmarks

Rose Daughter

Rose Madder

Ruby the Red Fairy

Ruinsong

Rule of Wolves

Runaway Vampire

Running with the Demon

Ruthless Vows

Sabriel

Sea of Swords

Season of Storms

Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary

Seeing Redd

Serpent & Dove

Servant of the Bones

Shadow and Bone

Shadow Games

Shadow of Night

Shadow Souls

Shadow Spell

Shadows Linger

She

Ship of Destiny

Shiver

Siege and Storm

Silver Borne

Sister Mine

Six of Crows

Skeleton crew

Skin Game

Skin Trade

Skipping Christmas

Skulduggery Pleasant

Slade House

Slewfoot

Small Favor

Small Gods

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Sojourn

Soldiers Live

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Song of Susannah

What fits on this shelf

Tags on this shelf

Romantasy

The other shelves

Romance

Sci-Fi

Horror

Mystery & Thriller

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Adventure

Who writes about these books

Baby Bat