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.
series2 books1937
completed
part of Tolkien's legendarium
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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.
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.
series8 books1995
part of His Dark Materials Universe
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His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. In 2003, the trilogy was ranked third on the BBC's The Big Read poll.
series3 books1986
completed
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Howl's Moving Castle (1986) follows Sophie Hatter, cursed by the Witch of the Waste into an old woman's body, who takes refuge in the wandering castle of the wizard Howl and strikes an uneasy bargain with his fire demon Calcifer while trying to break the spell. Diana Wynne Jones returned to the same magical kingdom in Castle in the Air (1990), following a new lead character, Abdullah, with Sophie and Howl appearing in supporting roles, and again in House of Many Ways (2008).
universe13 books1995
Start hereHis Dark Materials · Start here
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In a world like ours and unlike it, every human soul walks outside the body in the shape of an animal — a daemon, who speaks, who cannot be lied to, and who settles into one fixed form only when childhood ends. This is the country of His Dark Materials: a company of parallel worlds across which an invisible dust of consciousness drifts down upon the waking mind; where a Church that calls itself the Magisterium would sooner sever a child's soul than let that Dust be understood; and where a golden instrument, the alethiometer, answers true questions for anyone with the patience to read it. Philip Pullman's design stands in two trilogies and a scatter of shorter tales. His Dark Materials — Northern Lights (published in America as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass — carries Lyra Belacqua from the rooftops of a shadow Oxford across the borders between worlds. The Book of Dust returns to that same territory: La Belle Sauvage looks back to Lyra as an infant carried through a great flood, while The Secret Commonwealth follows her grown and less certain into adulthood, with a concluding volume closing the arc. Around them sit slim companion books — Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine — and Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation, made with Pullman's blessing. The register is grave and luminous at once, its title lifted from Milton and its quarrel drawn from Blake: a story that takes the side of curiosity, love, and the physical world against any authority that would forbid them. It reads as adventure — armoured bears, aeronauts, knife-cut windows between skies — yet reasons like philosophy. Begin with Northern Lights / The Golden Compass and read the first trilogy through before turning to The Book of Dust, which deepens everything the first has already made you feel.
series7 books1982
part of The Riftwar Universe
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The Riftwar Saga is Raymond E. Feist's debut fantasy trilogy, opening with Magician, in which an orphaned apprentice named Pug is swept up when otherworldly invaders emerge through a dimensional rift into the frontier kingdom of Midkemia. Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon carry the resulting war to its close, and the trilogy became the founding entry of Feist's much larger Riftwar Cycle.
universe6 books1989
Start hereElenium · Start here
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Sir Sparhawk is not a young man, and he has little patience for the pageantry his order pretends to. A Pandion Knight of the militant Elene Church, he rides home from a long exile to find his kingdom rotten with intrigue and his young queen, Ehlana, poisoned — kept alive only inside a shell of living crystal. To wake her he must find Bhelliom, a jewel with the power to remake the world or unmake it. So begins a long ride across the continent of Eosia. This is warm, character-first epic fantasy from David Eddings, told across two trilogies. The Elenium — The Diamond Throne, The Ruby Knight, The Sapphire Rose — pits Sparhawk against a corrupt church and a hungry elder god. The Tamuli — Domes of Fire, The Shining Ones, The Hidden City — carries him east into the vast Tamul Empire, where older enemies stir. Around him gathers a quarrelsome company: the Styric sorceress Sephrenia, the thief-boy Talen, the plain-spoken squire Kurik, and a small, imperious goddess who plays a set of pipes and always, somehow, gets her way. The pleasure here is the talk — grizzled knights trading dry insults between miracles and murders, a hero who solves as many problems with patience as with a sword. It never reaches for grimness or grand obscurity; it wants your good company for a long journey. Newcomers begin with The Diamond Throne and read the six in order: the Elenium stands whole on its own before the Tamuli widens the map.
William Morrisstandalone novel1896
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The Well at the World's End is a high fantasy novel by the British textile designer, poet, and author William Morris. It was first published in 1896 and has been reprinted repeatedly since, most notably in two parts as the 20th and 21st volumes of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, in August and September 1970.
series27 books1950
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Dying Earth is a speculative fiction series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984. Some have been called picaresque. The series includes short story collections, fix-ups, and novels.
series3 books1989
completed
part of Sparhawk
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The Elenium is a series of fantasy novels by American writer David Eddings. The series consists of three volumes: The Diamond Throne, The Ruby Knight, and The Sapphire Rose. The series is followed by The Tamuli. The Elenium is Eddings' third fantasy series.
series72 books1961
part of Moorcock's Multiverse
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The Elric Saga is Michael Moorcock's sequence of sword-and-sorcery novels about Elric, the frail, sorcery-dependent last emperor of the ancient island empire of Melniboné, who abandons his throne to wander a violent, magic-soaked world carrying a sentient, soul-drinking black sword. Core entries such as Elric of Melniboné, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and Stormbringer trace his path toward a self-destructive destiny, and Elric was later folded into Moorcock's wider Eternal Champion multiverse, of which this saga is one strand.
universe54 books2005
Start hereThe Final Empire · Start here
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Before the worlds, there was Adonalsium, and then there was not. A god shattered into sixteen Shards of raw creative power, and those who seized them carried their fragments across the void to seed new planets, new peoples, new ways of working the impossible. The Cosmere is the one universe those Shards made: a scattering of worlds that seem, at first, to share nothing but a sky, until you notice the same law running quietly beneath each of them, and the same silent traveler passing through their margins. Every world keeps its own book and its own magic. On Scadrial, the Mistborn cycle burns metals into power: a self-contained trilogy of thieves and tyranny, followed by a second era that drags the same world into gunslinging early industry. On storm-battered Roshar, The Stormlight Archive raises its vast, ongoing epic around knights, spren, and oaths spoken aloud. Elsewhere stand the shorter keystones: Elantris, a city of fallen gods; Warbreaker, a tale of returned dead and living color; White Sand, told in graphic-novel form under the twin suns of Taldain. Threaded between them run the novellas, from Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter to The Sunlit Man and the pieces gathered in Arcanum Unbounded, where the hidden connections surface most plainly. All of it is the design of one hand, Brandon Sanderson, working a single pattern across two decades. What sets this universe apart is its faith in rules: magic here is a system, lawful and learnable, so discovery feels less like wonder handed down than like physics worked out. The cross-connections reward the patient reader, a symbol here, a name there, one immortal wanderer everywhere, but no book demands you have read another first. Newcomers do best entering through Mistborn: The Final Empire, the most self-contained doorway, or the standalone Elantris or Warbreaker; readers who prefer their epics vast can begin with The Way of Kings. The deeper links, and the novellas that expose them, wait for whenever you are ready to look.
series7 books1967
part of Moorcock's Multiverse
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The History of the Runestaff is an omnibus collection of four fantasy novels by British writer Michael Moorcock, consisting of The Jewel in the Skull, The Mad God's Amulet, The Sword of the Dawn, and The Runestaff. Charting the adventures of Dorian Hawkmoon, a version of the Eternal Champion, it takes place in a far-future version of Europe in which the insane rulers of the Dark Empire of Granbretan are engaged in conquering the continent. Written between 1967 and 1969, it is considered a classic of the genre, and has proven highly influential in shaping subsequent authors' works.
series3 books1976
completed
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Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy follows Morgon, prince of the small island of Hed, whose discovery of three star-shaped birthmarks on his forehead draws him into a search for his own hidden identity and a confrontation with ancient, shape-shifting powers. Drawing on Celtic myth, the three books are prized for their lyrical prose and riddle-based magic, and are often cited among the best high fantasy of the 1970s.
series6 books1971
part of Moorcock's Multiverse
similar bymagical artifactsadventuroussecondary worldfantasy
series12 books1993
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The Ile-Rien books are a series of fantasy novels by Martha Wells set in the fictional country of Ile-Rien. It is a centralized monarchy governed by the Fontainon dynasty, governing from their ornate capital of Vienne. It is also the home of the university-city of Lodun, a great center of learning, producing world-renowned scholars in medicine, law and sorcery. Its neighbors are the nations of Adera, Umberwald and Parscia, as well as Bisra, its long-standing enemy. Ile-Rien shares a coastline along the Western Ocean with Parscia.
series4 books2014
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Millennium's Rule is set across multiple worlds that only certain travelers can cross between, opening with Tyen, an archaeology student who unearths a sentient, centuries-old book named Vella, and Rielle, a dyer's daughter hiding forbidden magical talent in a society ruled by priests who forbid it. Trudi Canavan follows both of them as their discoveries chip away at what their worlds have taught them about magic, history, and who holds power. The series runs Thief's Magic, Angel of Storms, and Successor's Promise.
series27 books1985
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Ethshar is a world where magic works, but never in just one way: witchcraft, wizardry, sorcery, and warlockry all follow their own separate rules, practiced by different, often rival, kinds of magicians across the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars. Lawrence Watt-Evans sets most of his Ethshar novels as standalone stories that don't need to be read in any order, following different ordinary people -- apprentices, soldiers, merchants -- who get pulled into magical trouble. Taken together, the growing series builds one of the more thoroughly systemized magic settings in fantasy without ever losing its lighter, folk-tale tone.
series3 books1995
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Luthien Bedwyr takes up the identity of the masked thief known as the Crimson Shadow to rally the peasants and fierce tribes of occupied Eriador against Greensparrow, the wizard-king who rules through fear and dark magic. R. A. Salvatore's trilogy follows Luthien's rebellion from small acts of resistance to open war, building toward a final confrontation that tests whether his own growing magical ability can match Greensparrow's. It's a fairly traditional occupation-and-uprising fantasy, told across The Sword of Bedwyr, The Dragon King, and Luthien's Gamble.