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- Forgotten Realms: The Legend of Drizzt
series39 books1988
part of Forgotten Realms
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The Legend of Drizzt is a series of fantasy novels by R. A. Salvatore that began in 1988, and consists of 39 books as of August 15, 2023. They are based in the Forgotten Realms setting in the dimension of Abeir-Toril on the continent Faerûn in the Dungeons & Dragons universe currently published and owned by Wizards of the Coast. It combines the series The Dark Elf Trilogy, The Icewind Dale Trilogy, Legacy of the Drow, Paths of Darkness, The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, and other sets into an abridged compilation. Drizzt Do'Urden is the main character of most of the books.
- Dragon Age (Bioware RPG tie-in)
series21 books2009
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These tie-in novels expand BioWare's Dragon Age video game series into prose, mostly written by the games' own lead writers, and are set in the same dark-fantasy world of Thedas. The Stolen Throne and The Calling serve as prequels filling in the backstory of characters central to the first game, while later books such as Asunder and The Masked Empire tie more directly into the plots and politics of the sequels. They are written for players wanting deeper lore rather than as standalone entry points to the setting.
- The Lord of the Rings
series13 books1954
part of Tolkien's legendarium
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The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel written by the English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's book The Hobbit but eventually developed into a much larger work. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 150 million copies sold.
- A Song of Ice and Fire
series14 books1996
part of World of Ice and Fire
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A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of high fantasy novels by the American author George R. R. Martin. Martin began writing the first volume, A Game of Thrones, in 1991, and published it in 1996. Martin, who originally envisioned the series as a trilogy, has released five out of seven planned volumes. The most recent entry in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011. Since then, Martin has been working on the sixth novel, titled The Winds of Winter. A seventh novel, A Dream of Spring, is planned to follow.
- The Broken Sword
Poul Andersonstandalone novel1954
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The Broken Sword is a fantasy novel by American writer Poul Anderson, originally published on 5 November 1954. A revised edition was issued by Ballantine Books in January 1971 as the twenty-fourth volume of their Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The original text was reissued by Gollancz in 2002. Set during the Viking Age, the novel features numerous references to Norse mythology.
- The Hobbit
series2 books1937
completed
part of Tolkien's legendarium
similar byfantasysecondary worldelvesadventurous
The Hobbit (1937) is J. R. R. Tolkien's children's fantasy novel following the reluctant burglar Bilbo Baggins, who joins a company of dwarves and the wizard Gandalf on a journey to reclaim treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. It stands as a complete adventure on its own, but shares its setting with the rest of Tolkien's legendarium and leads into the events of The Lord of the Rings.
- Shannara
universe50 books1977
Start hereWord and the Void · The very beginning of the timeline
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Long after the world we know has burned itself to slag in the Great Wars, the Four Lands rise green over the bones of the old age. Science is a forbidden memory; magic has come back into the world, and with it the old divisions — Men, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and Gnomes, each Race a splinter of what humanity became. This is the far-future Earth of Shannara, where the ruins buried beneath the soil are ours, and the only keepers of the vanished knowledge are the Druids of Paranor, who wake once a generation to meet the darkness rising again. Terry Brooks opened the Four Lands in 1977 with The Sword of Shannara and has charted its history for four decades since — a legendarium ordered not by throne but by a single bloodline, the Ohmsfords, each generation inheriting an Elfstone, a blade, or a wishsong when the age demands a hero. The original trilogy gives way to the Heritage of Shannara, the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, the High Druid, Dark Legacy, Defenders, and the concluding Fall of Shannara; the Genesis of Shannara books reach back to the apocalypse itself, and the Word and the Void trilogy back further still, into a demon-haunted version of our own present that is the root of everything after. In 2025 Brooks passed the histories to Delilah S. Dawson to carry forward. What sets these books apart is their long memory: a world where every triumph is provisional, where the same evil returns wearing a fresh shape each age, and magic always exacts its price. The reading is warm and headlong — questing companies, old talismans, journeys across a mapped and named wilderness — shadowed by the knowledge that all of it stands on the wreckage of a former world. Enter as readers first did: with The Sword of Shannara, then onward in publication order. The chronological path, beginning with Word and the Void, rewards a second journey, once the Four Lands already feel like home.
- Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
series11 books1977
similar bydarksecondary worldfantasy
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a series of ten high fantasy novels written by American author Stephen R. Donaldson. The series began as a trilogy, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. This was followed by another trilogy, The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and finally a tetralogy, The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
- Winterlands
series7 books1986
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Winterlands follows John Aversin, a practical, unglamorous dragon-slayer, and Jenny Waynest, the self-taught village witch he loves, as their small corner of a forgotten kingdom keeps getting dragged into magic far bigger than either of them wanted. Barbara Hambly's series opens with Dragonsbane (1985), which deliberately undercuts the 'brave knight slays dragon' story it seems to promise, and continues across Dragonshadow, Knight of the Demon Queen, and Dragonstar as Jenny pursues real magical training. It favors domestic detail and moral complexity over conventional high-fantasy grandeur.
- The Drenai Saga
series15 books1984
completed
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David Andrew Gemmell was a British author of heroic fantasy, best known for his debut novel, Legend. A former journalist and newspaper editor, Gemmell had his first work of fiction published in 1984. He went on to write over thirty novels. Gemmell's works display violence, yet also explore themes of honour, loyalty and redemption. There is always a strong heroic theme but nearly always the heroes are flawed in some way. With over one million copies sold, his work continues to sell worldwide.
- Corum
series6 books1971
part of Moorcock's Multiverse
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- Beklan Empire
series2 books1974
completed
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Two standalone novels by Richard Adams set in the same invented world, the Beklan Empire, an ancient, quasi-Mediterranean land of god-kings, slave markets, and warring city-states. Shardik (1974) follows a hunter swept into a religious and military frenzy over a giant bear believed to be the vessel of a god; Maia (1984) turns to an earlier generation of the empire and follows a slave girl's rise through its court and conquests. The two novels share only their setting, not characters or plot.
- Narnia
series26 books1950
part of Narnia Universe
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The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven portal fantasy novels by British author C. S. Lewis. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes and originally published between 1950 and 1956, the series is set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals. It narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the Narnian world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protagonists are all children from the real world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are sometimes called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician's Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle.
- A Court of Thorns and Roses
series6 books2015
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A Court of Thorns and Roses is a fantasy romance series by American author Sarah J. Maas, which follows the journey of 19-year-old Feyre Archeron after she is brought into the faerie lands of Prythian. The first book of the series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, was published in May 2015. The series centers on Feyre's adventures across Prythian and the faerie courts, following the epic love story and fierce struggle that ensues after she enters the fae lands. The series has sold over 13 million copies. There are currently five novels in the series, with the sixth scheduled to release on October 27, 2026, and the seventh on January 12, 2027. An eighth installment is set to conclude the continuous story told across books six, seven and eight.
- The History of Middle Earth
series14 books1983
completed
part of Tolkien's legendarium
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The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books published between 1983 and 1996 by George Allen & Unwin in the UK and by Houghton Mifflin in the US. They collect and analyse much of J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, compiled and edited by his son Christopher Tolkien. The series shows the development over time of Tolkien's conception of Middle-earth as a fictional place with its own peoples, languages, and history, from his earliest notions of "a mythology for England" through to the development of the stories that make up The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. It is not a "history of Middle-earth" in the sense of being a chronicle of events in Middle-earth written from an in-universe perspective; it is instead an out-of-universe history of Tolkien's creative process. In 2000, the twelve volumes were republished in three limited edition omnibus volumes.
- The Dark Star Trilogy
series2 books2019
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Marlon James's Dark Star Trilogy opens with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, in which a mercenary tracker is hired to find a missing boy and is drawn into a war between kingdoms across a continent built from African history and mythology. The second volume, Moon Witch, Spider King, retells much of the same span of time from the perspective of a rival witness, deliberately contradicting the first narrator's account. The trilogy is conceived as one conflict viewed through incompatible narrators rather than a linear continuation.
- Sundering (Jacqueline Carey)
series2 books2004
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The Sundering is a series of two fantasy novels by Jacqueline Carey made up of Banewreaker, and Godslayer. The books portray a conflict between light and dark, with many of the common conventions of fantasy fiction. The world and many of the characters of the novels are similar to those found in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, as Carey presents a similar story as a tragedy told from the "dark" side's perspective. Though one side can be considered light, consisting of Elf-like creatures, Men, and Dwarves, and the other dark, with an army of Trolls, neither can be considered solely "good" or "evil".
- Wars of Vis
series3 books1976
completed
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Tanith Lee's Wars of Vis trilogy is set on a world of feuding city-states, following the warlord Raldnor Am Anackire's rise as long-buried tensions between the pale-skinned Vis and darker-skinned Lowlanders erupt into open war and the revelation of hidden power. The Storm Lord opens the trilogy, continued by Anackire and The White Serpent.
- The Lotus War
series4 books2012
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The Lotus War is Jay Kristoff's steampunk fantasy trilogy set in a pollution-choked, Japanese-inspired empire: Stormdancer (2012), Kinslayer and Endsinger, with the novella The Last Stormdancer as a coda. It follows a young woman who tames a griffin-like beast thought extinct, drawing her into a rebellion against the empire's oppressive Shogunate. It is a complete trilogy plus novella.
- Malazan
universe36 books1999
Start hereMalazan Book of the Fallen · Start here
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Pity the historian who tries to map this world; pity more the god who thinks he rules it. The Malazan Empire marches across continents on the boots of its common soldiers, and above them move Ascendants — mortals grown into something like gods, and gods worn thin as old coin. Magic is drawn from Warrens, roads of power threaded through reality; the dead keep their grudges; and every empire, however vast, is a wager against time. This is epic fantasy told from the mud, where a sapper cracking a joke weighs as much as an immortal settling a feud older than the human race. The world began as a tabletop campaign two friends built in the 1980s, and it still moves by two hands. Steven Erikson's ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen is the spine — Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, on through The Crippled God — each book a near-standalone campaign that only later reveals how it locks together. Ian C. Esslemont walks the same years from a different vantage in his Novels of the Malazan Empire (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard onward). Around them stand the prequels: Erikson's Kharkanas Trilogy, archaic and elegiac, chronicling a doomed elder people, and Esslemont's brisker Path to Ascendancy, following two adventurers before they became legends. Erikson's Witness sequence carries the tale forward, and novellas of the genial necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach supply the gallows comedy. Nothing is explained to you; comprehension is earned, and that is the pleasure. The themes run deep — compassion set against cruelty, the toll empires charge, civilizations that fall and are mourned. Begin where the saga does, with Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, and read the ten in publication order; the prequels are for the already-initiated. Trust that confusion is the price of entry.
