The 10 Most Amazing Fantasy Books Ever Written
At any given moment, Scott Simone has at least three books jockeying for his attention. He’ll never turn down a campus novel with a literary bent, nor will he hesitate to add yet another mystery to his Leaning Tower of Pisa-inspired to-be-read pile — which is built upon the bedrocks of too many short story collections, how-are-these-real true crime books, and classics waiting to be cracked open again. Topics that have him ripping through pages the fastest include closed-circle murders, unhappy professors, life-questioning philosophical deep dives, so long as they feature sharp sentences, a dark sense of humor, and at least a little malice.
He’s spent so much time in book shops over the years he is, to his wife’s chagrin, continuing to build a library that doesn’t quite respect the dimensions of the apartment meant to contain it.
We’re prepared to believe an awful lot when reading fantasy: the lion who speaks perfectly good English, or the Devil arriving in Moscow with a giant black cat who carries a pistol. Okay, we’ll go along with it. But then a character makes a decision that doesn’t quite ring true, and the whole world that was built over hundreds of pages crumbles. Because, apparently, we can accept talking animals, sorcery, and people rising from the dead, but we can’t abide a character acting a fool for no good reason.
It’s a strange demand to make of books in which practically anything can happen, but the greatest fantasy writers seem to understand it rather well. They dream up entire civilizations and give them thousands of years of history, and then they populate those stories with people who are just as vain, just as greedy, and, occasionally, just as heroic as anyone you’d meet in real life. That’s why with the best fantasy books, the magic is almost beside the point. Indeed, what makes them amazing is how lived-in and immersive they seem, making our suspension of disbelief that much easier.
‘The Lord of the Rings’ (1954–1955)
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Bilbo Baggins leaves his nephew Frodo a troublesome inheritance. There’s Bag End, the comfortable hobbit-hole in the Shire, but also a plain gold ring his uncle picked up during an adventure decades earlier. It can make its wearer invisible, which seems a useful enough trick. Unfortunately, it belongs to Sauron, a Dark Lord who’s been searching for it ever since he lost it, and now his servants are getting uncomfortably close to the Shire. Frodo has little choice but to leave home. The only way to destroy the ring is to carry it to Mount Doom, which happens to sit in the middle of Sauron’s territory.
J.R.R. Tolkien spent years inventing the languages and history of Middle-earth, so much so that The Lord of the Rings reads like an account of a place that actually existed. Characters exist amongst ruined kingdoms and sing about long-dead heroes — some of the creatures even knew those heroes personally. And Tolkien didn’t go to all that trouble just to show off his imagination. All that history carries a fair amount of grief: the elves are leaving, great kingdoms have crumbled, and even defeating Sauron won’t bring back what’s been lost. And that’s what makes The Lord of the Rings so much more than a grand adventure.
‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ (1950)
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Lucy Pevensie has been sent to a country house during the war, where she discovers that one of its wardrobes has a forest behind the fur coats. Mr. Tumnus, who just so happens to be a faun, invites her for tea, and she learns that Narnia has been stuck in winter for years. Her siblings, of course, think she’s making the whole thing up, but they eventually find their way through, and Edmund falls in with the White Witch.
C.S. Lewis doesn’t bother explaining how a wardrobe leads to another world; he simply gets you through the door, and then he carries on with the story. And while Narnia is built upon fantastical elements, the trouble starts with something all-too-real: sibling rivalry. Edmund resents his brother and sisters, something the Witch is happy to take advantage of. Lewis may have drawn heavily from Christian theology, but he stopped short of turning the story into a sermon. But what he does do is hinge the fate of an entire kingdom on a boy’s petty betrayal, then asks whether that same boy deserves to be forgiven.
‘Little, Big’ (1981)
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Image via William Morrow Paperbacks</figure>
Smoky Barnable is walking to his wedding — not because he can’t afford a car, but because his fiancée’s great-aunt consulted some cards and decided he should arrive on foot. He’s headed to Edgewood, a rambling house that looks like several buildings cobbled together. Smoky’s marrying Daily Alice Drinkwater, but her family takes some getting used to. They talk about fairies as though they’re relatives, and they seem convinced they’re part of a mysterious family destiny called the Tale. Nobody’s particularly inclined to explain what that means.
John Crowley follows the Drinkwaters through four generations, spending as much time on unhappy marriages and petty feuds as he does on Faerie, which hovers at the edges of their lives. Even Edgewood is somehow bigger inside than out. The novel works the same way: a story that sounds trivial in one generation becomes terribly important in another. The family spends an awful lot of time waiting to see what the Tale has in store, sometimes at the expense of the lives they’re actually living. You want to tell them to stop waiting on the fairies and get on with things, but by then, you’re waiting just as eagerly.
‘Journey to the West’ (1592)
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Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is a menace. He’s picked fights with the gods and caused such an uproar in heaven that Buddha eventually traps him beneath a mountain. Five centuries later, he gets another chance when a Buddhist monk named Xuanzang needs an escort on a pilgrimage to India. Monkey agrees to protect him; trouble is, the monk believes in mercy and restraint, while Monkey would generally prefer to settle disagreements with his magical staff.
Traditionally attributed to Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West is a riot: demons seem to be waiting around every corner, and the gods aren’t much help, since they’re too busy bickering among themselves. Monkey doesn’t make the journey any easier. He can defeat armies single-handedly, but ask him to exercise a little patience and you’re likely to get another fight. There’s a wonderful irony here: the pilgrimage is supposed to teach its travelers humility and self-restraint, yet the one doing most of the rescuing is the fellow who needs those lessons most. Wu gets a remarkable amount of comedy out of that arrangement without losing sight of the religious journey beneath it.
‘The Master and Margarita’ (1967)
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Image via Vintage Classics</figure>
The Devil arrives in Moscow posing as a professor, accompanied by a giant black cat who carries a pistol. Soon, money is raining from a theater ceiling, officials are disappearing, and women find their fancy new dresses have vanished right off their backs. Nobody can explain any of it, though that doesn’t stop people from trying. Margarita, meanwhile, is trying to find her lover, a writer who disappeared after critics tore apart his novel about Pontius Pilate, and Woland, the Devil himself, offers to help if she becomes a witch and presides over Satan’s ball.
Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita under Stalin, so he knew a thing or two about the dangers of upsetting the wrong people, and his contempt for Moscow’s literary establishment is difficult to miss. Pontius Pilate isn’t much braver. He knows he’s sending an innocent man to his death, but saving him might invite trouble from Rome, and that’s a risk he’s not willing to take. It’s quite a lot to juggle, even before you get to all the witchcraft. But there’s a rather nasty joke running through the whole novel. For all his supernatural mischief, the Devil has arrived in a city where people have already made a mess of things themselves.
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
- This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends. - You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
everything you touch is older than your entire family line. - The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight. - You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.
- One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together. - You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea. - The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
harder because of that rather than in spite of it. - You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
it.
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.
- Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept. - You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer. - The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people. - You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
got told wrong.
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.
- Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse. - You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
something nobody thought to test for. - The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
every time a prophecy tries to get in the way. - Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
‘The Famished Road’ (1991)
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Azaro has made an unpopular decision: he intends to stay alive. He’s an abiku, a spirit child expected to die young and return to the spirit world. But Azaro would rather stay with his parents, much to the annoyance of the spirits, who keep turning up wherever he goes and trying to coax him back. As though the boy doesn’t have enough to worry about, his father can barely earn a living, and the neighborhood politicians seem determined to make things worse.
Ben Okri makes the supernatural part of everyday life. Azaro can run into some hideous spirit while wandering through the market, then come home to find his parents squabbling over money. Madame Koto’s bar seems to attract a strange crowd every time he visits, some of whom hardly seem human at all. Okri doesn’t stop to explain what’s real and what isn’t, writing as though the question hardly matters. It’s a dizzying way to tell a story, but that’s part of what makes The Famished Road so extraordinary. The spirit world is as real as the poverty and political violence surrounding Azaro, and occasionally no more frightening.
‘The Fifth Season’ (2015)
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Essun returns home to find that her husband has murdered their young son and run off with their daughter. As if she needed another problem, the world is falling apart — literally. An enormous rupture has torn through the Stillness, a continent where earthquakes are already a fact of life. There are people who can control the forces behind such disasters, though: the orogenes, and Essun happens to be one, but she has spent years keeping her abilities to herself. People aren’t terribly kind to orogenes, and she’d rather not find out what happens when they discover she’s one.
N.K. Jemisin imagines a civilization that’s survived the end of the world before. Everyone assumes it’ll happen again, and they’ve spent generations preparing for it. You’d think that would make orogenes rather valuable. Instead, their children endure brutal training, and the adults spend their lives under somebody else’s thumb. Jemisin doesn’t make things particularly easy for the reader, telling three seemingly separate stories, including one in the second person, and leaving you to puzzle out how they fit together. Then, just when you think you’ve got a handle on things, she reveals how much you’ve misunderstood.
‘Piranesi’ (2020)
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Piranesi lives in a house so enormous that he’s never managed to find its end. Statues fill the halls, the sea regularly floods the lower floors, and birds nest overhead. He’s learned to fish, worked out the tides, and keeps meticulous journals of his discoveries. He even looks after the bones of thirteen dead people, leaving them little offerings. As far as he knows, only one other person is alive, the Other, and they meet twice a week to discuss some great secret the House supposedly contains.
Susanna Clarke tells the story through Piranesi’s journals, and the poor fellow is so painstaking that he keeps writing down clues he doesn’t recognize. You’ll spot something suspicious in one entry, only for him to return to cataloging statues in the next. It can drive you mad, but Clarke also makes you understand why he’s so fond of the place. Piranesi finds more pleasure in watching a bird build its nest than the Other seems to get from anything. And while you’re busy trying to unravel the mystery, Clarke gets you attached to this impossible world, too.
‘Lud-in-the-Mist’ (1926)
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The people of Lud-in-the-Mist have a simple way of dealing with their neighbors in Fairyland: they pretend they don’t exist. Fairy fruit is forbidden, and respectable people certainly don’t discuss it over dinner. Mayor Nathaniel Chanticleer is perfectly happy with this arrangement until the fruit starts turning up in town. Children begin behaving strangely, and even his son appears to have gotten a taste. Nathaniel would rather leave the whole unpleasant business alone, but it’s becoming rather difficult to ignore.
Hope Mirrlees has plenty of fun with Lud’s respectable citizens. They’ve spent generations insisting Fairyland is a lot of nonsense, yet devote an astonishing amount of energy to keeping its fruit out of town. And the stuff really can cause trouble; people who eat it don’t always emerge quite themselves. Nathaniel soon discovers that his fellow citizens have become so frightened of anything they can’t explain that they’re practically afraid of their imaginations. Mirrlees makes their attempts to preserve order increasingly ridiculous, while gradually revealing just how much they’ve lost by shutting the fairies out.
‘Redemption in Indigo’ (2010)
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Paama has finally had enough of her husband. Ansige eats like a man preparing for a famine, steals food when he can’t get enough, and generally makes himself everybody else’s problem. She leaves him and returns to her family. You’d think that would be the end of it, but her decision attracts the attention of the djombi, immortal spirits who decide she’d make a suitable keeper of a magical stick that controls chaos. There’s just one problem: one of those spirits believes the stick belongs to him, and he’d rather have it back.
Karen Lord takes a Senegalese folktale and gives it a mischievous spin. The narrator has plenty of opinions and isn’t shy about sharing them, while the supposedly all-powerful spirits behave like spoiled children. And Paama, after years of putting up with Ansige, isn’t terribly interested in indulging anyone else’s nonsense. Lord has more on her mind than getting a laugh, though. Paama now has the power to interfere in other people’s lives, and she knows all too well what it’s like to be at someone else’s mercy.
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