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 9 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonMurgen is inside the siege of Dejagore, where both sides are committing atrocities and where the company's situation looks worse by the day. He is also telling the story from somewhere else, out of order and years too late, and the account he gives of Taglios and of the Liberator's rule is as tangled as the siege itself.
Rating coming soonLady is left for dead when the company is broken at the end of Shadow Games, and she begins the novel by digging herself out of a heap of the dead. Separated from Croaker and the rest of the unit, she attaches herself to two strange men and starts to rebuild an army in a country that has very little appetite for another war.
Rating coming soonMost of the Black Company's leadership is held in stasis beneath the glittering plain, and the survivors have been fighting a guerrilla war in Taglios with whatever they can find. The plan now is to free the people who are sleeping underground, which means reaching the plain, getting past the last of the Shadowmasters and surviving whatever the plain does to the company that walks on it.
Rating coming soonThe gods of the Myriad were enormous sea creatures that fed on human fear, and thirty years ago they turned on each other and tore one another apart. What is left of them is valuable: the remains of their bodies are cut and sold as godware. Hark lives on the island of Lady's Crave with his friend Jelt, and one of the gods is not as dead as everyone believes.
Rating coming soonLiga is fifteen and motherless, and she has been abused by her father for years. When she becomes pregnant for the third time she tries to end her life, and instead finds herself in a gentler world where she can bring up the two daughters she has, safe from the place she came from. The two worlds do not stay apart.
Rating coming soonTyr is a city on a world of dust and heat, ruled for a thousand years by the sorcerer-king Kalak, whose magic has reduced the place to fear and blood. He is preparing to make himself into something immortal, and the people who could stop him are a statesman with a bad reputation, a half-elf slave girl and a dwarf gladiator who have very little in common.
Rating coming soonWydrin of Crosshaven and Sir Sebastian make their living by going down into ruins and coming back with something worth selling, and they have heard the stories about the caverns beneath the Citadel without believing any of them. Then a crippled nobleman offers them money to go and look, and the thing they find down there has been waiting for someone to open the way.
Rating coming soonThe Age of Ruin is a time that needs heroes, and the candidates are scattered and in poor condition: a former rebel now serving as an unwilling envoy between the powerful, a half-mage in disgrace whose warnings about a coming war are being ignored, and others who would rather not be involved at all. The war arrives anyway.
Rating coming soonWren Southerland's reckless use of magic has cost her the place she had in the Queen's Guard and the company of the friend she loves. So when a letter arrives from a reclusive lord asking her to come to his estate to cure a patient, she takes the commission, and finds that the house and the man she is meant to heal are not what the letter described.
Rating coming soonA young woman born out of wedlock and shunned by the society she was raised in makes a bargain with a god, and the bargain is for revenge on the aristocratic family that turned its back on her. What the god wants in return, and what the house he keeps turns out to contain, is not explained to her in advance.
Rating coming soonA wave takes Mau's island village and everyone in it, and it leaves him and a girl from the other side of the world as the only people left on the island. She is called Daphne, she was on a ship when the wave came, and between them they have to work out how to live somewhere that has lost every adult who knew how anything was done.
Rating coming soonThe warrior cats have lived in peace around the lake for many moons, but a shadow is gathering on the edge of their territories and the clans are not ready for it. One young cat is given a message that points beyond everything the clans have mapped, and following it means leaving behind the only country he has ever known.
Rating coming soonLee Scoresby lands his balloon at Novy Odense, a cold port in the north where a businessman and a politician between them intend to decide how the place is run. Lee takes the side of a sea captain who has been robbed of his cargo, and the help he gets comes from an unexpected direction: an armoured bear.
Rating coming soonThe Black Company has become the Lady's favoured soldiers, which is not a comfortable place to be. When the Company's historian and physician, Croaker, is asked to work with a powerful new member called Mischievous Rain to break a rebel army, he has excellent reasons to distrust the court of sorcerers paying them. The work takes the Company into country where nothing is quite what it appears and help is never free.
Rating coming soonThe 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.
Rating coming soonAlice has spent her childhood moving from place to place with her mother, staying one step ahead of the bad luck that follows them. Her grandmother wrote a scarce book of dark fairy tales that Alice has never read, and when her mother is taken, Alice and an obsessive fan of those stories go looking for the world they came from.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonHerald Mags, the King of Valdemar's Herald Spy, has built a network of young informants in the streets of Haven and in the kitchens of the great houses. His wife Amily is King's Own Herald, and finds it useful to be underestimated. Somebody has collected the secrets of the women of the Court.
Rating coming soonNico di Angelo, son of Hades, has lost his mother, his sister and his friend Jason, and he has been outed against his will. His boyfriend Will Solace, son of Apollo, is the one bright thing in his life. Then a voice begins calling to Nico from Tartarus, and he is sure he knows who it is. Will insists on going with him.
Rating coming soonAt her birth, Ella of Frell is given a foolish fairy's gift: obedience. She must obey any order she is given, whether it is to hop on one foot for a day and a half or to do something far worse. Ella is strong-willed enough to refuse to accept the gift as her fate, and she sets out to break the curse.
Rating coming soonThe story everyone knows is that Alice was an ordinary girl who visited an invented world. The truth, in this novel, is that Wonderland is real: Alyss Heart is its heir until her aunt Redd murders her parents and takes the crown, and Alyss and her bodyguard are separated while fleeing through the Pool of Tears.
Rating coming soonNico di Angelo and Will Solace return from Tartarus and travel to Camp Jupiter, where Hazel Levesque needs help with a problem they caused: the monsters of the Underworld have learned that they have options and some have come to the camp seeking refuge. Then the newcomers start disappearing one by one, and all three of them turn out to be connected to whoever is taking them.
Rating coming soonAlyss 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.
Rating coming soonTwo hundred years after Cinderella found her prince, the fairy tale has become a state ritual. Every year teenage girls must attend the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom choose wives; girls who are not chosen are never heard from again. Sophia would rather marry her childhood friend Erin. At the ball she runs.
Rating coming soonIt is 1931 in Shanghai. Four years earlier, Rosalind Lang was brought back from the brink of death by an experiment that also stopped her sleeping or ageing and gave her the ability to heal from any wound. She now works as an assassin for her country, and the Japanese invasion changes her orders. Solving the murders requires her to pose as the wife of a man she does not trust.
Rating coming soonThe Heart Crystal has been depleted, and imagination has gone with it. The people of Wonderland have lost their creative drive, and Queen Alyss no longer has her powers. Her enemy Redd has been disabled as well, and is proposing an alliance against King Arch, the man who now holds the realm and everyone in it.
Rating coming soonEvery dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night and has her executed at sunrise. Sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry him, with a plan to stay alive and take revenge on the boy who killed her best friend and countless other girls.
Rating coming soonSixteen-year-old Manisha has spent years running from monsters: the beasts of the jungle and the King's army, which scattered her people, the naga, across the world. She has found shelter as a priestess in the holy temples on the floating mountains, but the temples are not as safe as they look. The King's most celebrated monster-slayer is a frequent visitor there.
Rating coming soonThe old tale has the spell broken by a prince's kiss. This retelling, the first of a trilogy, begins with the prince waking Beauty by other means and taking her away from the castle, where she is trained in the customs of his household instead of being returned to the parents who have slept through her hundred years.
Rating coming soonBlackwood Academy stands on the fringes of the afterlife, and once a student passes through its gates there is no way out except the Decennial, a magical competition with a single victor. Six of the school's best students have been chosen for its tests this year, and only one of them will win a way out of the school.
Rating coming soonA poor miller's daughter has been cursed by the god of lies and has a talent for spinning stories that are entirely untrue. When one of her tales attracts the sinister Erlking and his undead hunters, she is carried into a world of ghouls and phantoms and told to spin straw into gold or be killed for lying.
Rating coming soonSerilda and Gild are trying to break the curses that tie their spirits to a haunted castle before the Endless Moon, when the Erlking intends to capture one of the seven gods and use a wish to bring his lover back from the underworld. As the deadline approaches it becomes clear that he wants all seven gods.
Rating coming soonSixteen-year-old Joan is sent to stay with her late mother's eccentric family in London for the summer, and it begins well: she likes her job at a historic house and her co-worker Nick has asked her out. Then she learns that her family are monsters with hidden powers, and that Nick is a monster slayer.
Rating coming soonBicho Raro, Colorado is a town of dark saints, forbidden love, miracle-mad owls, estranged relations and a sky full of desert stars. At its very centre is the Soria family, who are able to perform unusual miracles, and three cousins who are each trying to change the family's future from inside it, for reasons of their own making.
Rating coming soonWill Farnaby, a journalist working for interests that want an island's oil, is shipwrecked on Pala, a small country in the Indian Ocean that has been left to run its own affairs for a century. He is taken in by a family who explain their society to him: its medicine, its schools, its psychology and the way it deals with the outside world. Pala is rich, and its neighbours want what it has.
Rating coming soonJason wakes on a school bus holding hands with a girl who says she is his girlfriend, with no memory of anything before that morning. Piper knows more than she is telling and has dreams about her missing father, and Leo can build almost anything. When monsters attack a school trip, the three of them are taken to Camp Half-Blood and given a quest to rescue a goddess.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson wakes with no memory of his life, hunted by monsters, and follows a wolf's training until he reaches a camp of Roman demigods who have never heard of him. There he meets Hazel, who is supposed to be dead, and Frank, whose family has secrets of its own. The three are sent north to Alaska to free the god of death.
Rating coming soonJames Henry Trotter loses his parents and is sent to live with two aunts who work him hard and give him nothing. An old man hands him a bag of green crystals and tells him they will make wonderful things happen, and James spills them by the old peach tree. One peach grows and grows, and James finds company for the first time inside it.
Rating coming soonMax puts on his wolf suit and makes so much trouble that his mother sends him to bed without any supper. His room turns into a forest, and a boat takes him across a sea to an island where the Wild Things live. They make him their king because he can stare them down, and they have a wild rumpus, and then Max has to decide what he wants most.
Rating coming soonThe second book about Winnie-the-Pooh collects ten more stories from the Hundred Acre Wood, in which a house is built for Eeyore, Tigger arrives and is unbounced, and Rabbit has a busy day. The stories are about the ordinary business of the forest: building, eating, getting lost and being found. At the end of the book Christopher Robin is growing up, and Pooh finds an enchanted place on top of the forest.
Rating coming soonHaroun Khalifa lives in a city so miserable that it has forgotten its name, with a father who is a famous storyteller. When his mother leaves and his father loses the gift of the gab, Haroun sets out to find out what has gone wrong with the stories. The journey takes him to a moon called Kahani and to a sea of stories that somebody is poisoning.
Rating coming soonWith their parents away, four children are left in a London boarding house where the only other lodger is an Egyptologist with a room full of antiquities. They meet the Psammead again, and with it an amulet that can carry them through time. Half of the charm is missing, and until they find the other half they cannot wish themselves home.
Rating coming soonHarper has cerebral palsy, a dying mother and a brother who does not think she can look after herself, and she is used to being underestimated. When she tries to stop a kidnapping in Washington she is pulled into another world, to a castle where the autumn of a prince's eighteenth year repeats and where a monster rampages at the end of every season.
Rating coming soonAn earthquake in California opens a crack in the ground, and Dorothy, her cousin Zeb and a horse fall through it into a country beneath the earth. They are joined by the Wizard, who arrived the same way, and by a piglet, and together they travel through lands of vegetable people and glass cities looking for a way back to the surface.
Rating coming soonTaran is an assistant pig-keeper in the land of Prydain, and men have been disappearing while the undead warriors of Arawn Death-Lord grow more numerous. A council of princes and allies decides that the only answer is to take the Black Cauldron itself, the thing that makes the dead soldiers, and destroy it. Taran insists on going.
Rating coming soonIn the last volume of the Prydain chronicles the forces of Arawn Death-Lord come south in earnest and the allies gather for the final campaign. Taran, who began the series as an assistant pig-keeper, has become a leader, and the book asks what he is prepared to give up for the good of the country. It also requires him to part with the people he loves.
Rating coming soonTommy Stubbins finds an injured squirrel and is told that the only man who can help is a doctor who speaks the language of animals. Dolittle takes him on as an assistant, and the two of them, with a parrot, a dog and the rest of the doctor's household of creatures, sail to find a missing naturalist on a floating island in the tropics.
Rating coming soonLuther 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.
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