series27 books1902
completed
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Two separate modern continuations of E. Nesbit's Psammead stories were written decades apart by different authors: Helen Cresswell's The Return of the Psammead (1992) brings the wish-granting sand fairy back for a new set of children, while Kate Saunders's Five Children on the Western Front (2014) follows the now-grown Lamb and his siblings as the First World War arrives, in a more somber sequel to Nesbit's original trilogy. Neither book is by Nesbit herself, and the two have no direct connection to each other beyond both drawing on her creation. Later writers have kept returning to Nesbit's premise long after her own trilogy ended.
series12 books1977
completed
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Chrestomanci, sometimes branded The Worlds of Chrestomanci, is a heptalogy of children's fantasy books written by British author Diana Wynne Jones, published from 1977 to 2006. In the context of the parallel universe setting of the books, Chrestomanci refers to both the British government office that is responsible for supervising the use of magic and Chrestomanci Castle in southern England, which is both residence and headquarters.
series59 books1995
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Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series reimagines classic fairy tales in various historical settings, with mages who each command one of the four elements — fire, water, earth, or air. The opening novel, The Fire Rose, retells Beauty and the Beast around a fire mage trapped in a werewolf-like curse; later volumes retell other tales and, from Elemental Magic on, bring in numerous co-authors and short-story contributors across more than twenty books.
Tim Powersstandalone novel1979
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Brian Duffy is a weary, aging Irish mercenary hired in Venice, for reasons he isn't given, to work as a bouncer at a Vienna inn that also happens to be Europe's oldest brewery -- one that produces a legendary dark beer only once every seven hundred years. He arrives just as the Ottoman army under Suleiman the Magnificent marches on Vienna, and just as strange visions and stranger company start converging on the inn: an old flame, her father's uncanny unfinished painting, and Duffy's mysterious employer, who has plans for him well beyond keeping the peace at closing time. Tim Powers's historical fantasy set during the 1529 siege of Vienna.
series24 books1983
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Diane Duane's Young Wizards series begins with thirteen-year-old Nita, bullied and friendless, who borrows a library book on wizardry and discovers it's the real thing: an apprenticeship into a covert order that fights entropy, alongside a classmate named Kit. Across fifteen books published between 1983 and 2019, the two age forward in something close to real time as their missions escalate from New York streets to alien worlds and beyond. The series centers on the wizard's Oath and the idea that magic is a responsibility taken on to slow the universe's decay, not a power to be enjoyed for its own sake.
Lois McMaster Bujoldstandalone novel1992
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The Spirit Ring is a 1992 historical fantasy by Lois McMaster Bujold based on Agricola's De re metallica. It was combined with the folkloric tradition of the grateful dead and the life of Benvenuto Cellini.
series3 books1983
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The Anubis Gates is a single time-travel fantasy novel by Tim Powers, following a present-day academic who takes part in a time-travel experiment and ends up stranded in early nineteenth-century London. It won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1983 and the Science Fiction Chronicle Award the following year.
series2 books2020
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Garth Nix's The Left-Handed Booksellers of London is set in a slightly alternate 1983 London, where Susan Arkshaw searches for the father she's never met. Her path crosses with Merlin, a left-handed bookseller — one of the fighting branch of an extended family of magical booksellers who police the mythic Old World where it intrudes on the modern one — who is pursuing his own hunt for the entity behind his mother's death. As their separate investigations tangle together, Susan's ordinary-seeming clues turn out to lead somewhere much stranger. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath continues their story.
Matthew Skeltonstandalone novel2006
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Endymion Spring is a children's fantasy novel by English Canadian author Matthew Skelton. It was first published in 2006.
Jonathan Stroudstandalone novel1999
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Buried Fire is a fantasy novel by Jonathan Stroud first published in 1999 by The Bodley Head. It was initially part of the Fire Chronicles, but later the series was disbanded by the publisher. It was supposed to be called The Four Gifts.
series4 books2002
completed
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The Troy Game is a quartet of fantasy novels by Australian author Sara Douglass consisting of four books: Hades' Daughter, God's Concubine, Darkwitch Rising and Druid's Sword. It centres on a group of characters who are reincarnated at the end of each book and take the form of renowned historical figures from different ages. The entire series is set in London and focuses on the characters trying to complete the Troy Game, a kind of spell cast in the first book to protect the city.
series3 books1980
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Gillian Bradshaw's Down the Long Wind trilogy retells the Arthurian legend from the perspective of Gwalchmai (Gawain), opening with Hawk of May and following him from a troubled, magic-touched childhood into Arthur's court and its wars. Kingdom of Summer and In Winter's Shadow carry the story through the reign's high point and into the betrayals that end it. Bradshaw favors a grounded, post-Roman Britain over the more overtly magical versions of the legend.
series4 books1990
completed
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William Corlett's The Magician's House quartet blends contemporary and historical settings around a rural manor, tending toward urban-fantasy sensibilities despite its countryside backdrop, in the vein of writers like Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. Published in the early 1990s as The Steps Up the Chimney, The Door in the Tree, The Tunnel Behind the Waterfall, and The Bridge in the Clouds, it was later adapted into two British television mini-series featuring the voices of Jennifer Saunders and Stephen Fry.
series8 books2002
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The Kingkiller Chronicle is a planned fantasy trilogy by the American writer Patrick Rothfuss. The first two books, The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, were released in 2007 and 2011. The books released in the series have sold over 10 million copies.
series12 books1962
completed
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The Wolves Chronicles is Joan Aiken's long-running alternate-history series for young readers, set in a nineteenth-century England ruled by the Stuart dynasty and beset by wolves that have migrated across a Channel land-bridge. It opens with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, in which two girls outwit a scheming governess sent to ruin them, and expands over twelve books into a sprawling saga of orphans, conspiracies, and journeys through a Britain quite unlike the real one. Aiken kept adding to the same timeline across more than four decades, including later prequels set before the first book.