anchored on:fantasy
series11 books1995
similar byfantasysecondary worldyoung adult+3 more
The Old Kingdom, or Abhorsen in North America and the UK, is a fantasy series written by Australian author Garth Nix. It originated in 1995 with the novel Sabriel and has continued in the novels Lirael (2001), Abhorsen (2003), Goldenhand (2016), and Terciel & Elinor (2021), as well as a prequel novel titled Clariel (2014). The Old Kingdom also consists of the novella The Creature in the Case (2005) and various other short fiction.
series3 books2015
part of Grishaverse
similar byfantasydarktensesecondary worldbig cityyoung adult
Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows duology (2015-2016) follows a crew of six criminal teenagers in Ketterdam, a city modeled on the Dutch Republic, as they pull off a near-impossible heist and then deal with its fallout. Told from multiple points of view, the books lean on the found-family bond between the crew members as much as the caper plotting, and sit within Bardugo's wider Grishaverse alongside her Shadow and Bone books.
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.
series18 books1964
completed
part of Earthsea
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The Earthsea Cycle, also known as Earthsea, is a series of high fantasy books written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972), the series was continued in Tehanu (1990), and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. In 2018, all the novels and short stories were published in a single volume, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, with artwork by Charles Vess.
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.
series5 books2023
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The Powerless Trilogy is set in a kingdom where people without magical abilities are treated as outcasts, following Paedyn Gray, a powerless girl disguising herself as a magic-wielder, who is drawn into the royal court and a survival competition after crossing paths with the crown prince. Lauren Roberts' trilogy, beginning with Powerless, was later expanded with a further Fearless duology set in the same world.
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.
series4 books2015
similar byfantasytensesecondary worldyoung adult+1 more
An Ember in the Ashes, set in a fantasy world modeled on ancient Rome, alternates between Laia, who spies on a brutal military academy for rebels in exchange for help freeing her imprisoned brother, and Elias, one of that academy's most skilled soldiers trying to break free of the empire he's been raised to serve. Sabaa Tahir's quartet, continuing through A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm, follows the two toward a reckoning with the empire that trained one of them to enforce it.
series20 books1999
part of Malazan
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The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a series of epic fantasy novels written by the Canadian author Steven Erikson. The series, published by Bantam Books in the U.K. and Tor Books in the U.S., consists of ten volumes, beginning with Gardens of the Moon (1999) and concluding with The Crippled God (2011). Erikson's series presents the narratives of a large cast of characters spanning thousands of years across multiple continents.
Adrienne Youngstandalone novel2021
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When a letter from her uncle Henrik arrives on Bryn Roth's eighteenth birthday, summoning her back to Bastian, Bryn is eager to prove herself and finally take her place in her long-lost family. Henrik has plans for Bryn, but she must win everyone’s trust if she wants to hold any power in the delicate architecture of the family. It doesn’t take long for her to see that the Roths are entangled in shadows. Despite their growing influence in upscale Bastian, their hands are still in the kind of dirty business that got Bryn’s parents killed years ago. With a forbidden romance to contend with and dangerous work ahead, the cost of being accepted into the Roths may be more than Bryn can pay.
series2 books2019
part of Grishaverse
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Leigh Bardugo's Nikolai Duology picks up Nikolai Lantsov and Zoya Nazyalensky from her earlier Grishaverse trilogy set in Ravka, now dealing with the kingdom's fallout as king and general, and adds Nina Zenik from the Six of Crows spin-off working a mission out of Ketterdam. King of Scars and its sequel Rule of Wolves tie together threads from across the wider Grishaverse rather than starting fresh, raising the stakes to a hidden threat inside Nikolai himself. It functions as the convergence point for Bardugo's separate Grishaverse story lines.
universe29 books2006
Start hereThe Blade Itself · Start here
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You want heroes? Best look elsewhere. The Circle of the World has kings and wizards and famous barbarians enough, but scratch any of them and you'll find a coward, a schemer, or a killer who's simply better at it than the rest. This is Joe Abercrombie's fantasy world: a grimy, blood-soaked continent where the fat and corrupt Union squats between the savage North and the scheming South, and where every noble cause turns out to have a knife hidden behind it. It opens with the First Law trilogy — The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings — following a crippled torturer with a razor wit, a weary Northman who would dearly like to stop fighting and can't, and a bald old wizard whose plans run older and colder than anyone guesses. Three self-contained standalones share the same ground and a familiar face or two: Best Served Cold takes its revenge across sunlit, murderous Styria; The Heroes crushes a whole war into three days over one worthless hill; Red Country rides the frontier. Short pieces (Sharp Ends) fill the gaps, and a generation on, the Age of Madness trilogy drags the old survivors into an age of factories, mobs, and revolution. What sets it apart is the honesty of its cynicism — close, sardonic points of view, gallows humour, and a flat refusal to let anyone stay clean. Violence carries a cost here; victory rarely settles anything; the wheel just turns and grinds someone new under it. Abercrombie recommends reading in publication order, and it's the right call: begin with The Blade Itself and let the world curdle around you. You have to be realistic about these things.
series9 books2012
part of Grishaverse
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Leigh Bardugo is an American fantasy author. She is best known for her young adult Grishaverse novels, which include the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows and King of Scars duologies. She also received acclaim for her paranormal fantasy adult debut, Ninth House. The Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows series have been adapted into Shadow and Bone by Netflix, and Ninth House will be adapted by Amazon Studios; Bardugo is an executive producer on both works.
series3 books2001
part of Kyralia series
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Trudi Canavan's Black Magician Trilogy (The Magicians' Guild, The Novice, The High Lord, 2001-2003) opens in the city of Imardin, where the ruling magicians' guild's annual purge of the slums goes wrong when a street girl named Sonea unknowingly shatters their protective shield with raw, untrained power. The guild must hunt her down and decide whether to control her or train her, and the trilogy follows Sonea's forced initiation into magical society and the guild's internal politics. It's Canavan's best-known trilogy and the founding story of her Kyralia setting.
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.
series2 books2021
similar byfantasydarktensesecondary worldyoung adultdark fantasy
series3 books2020
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The Scholomance Trilogy is a series of three fantasy novels written by American author Naomi Novik. The books follow the adventures of Galadriel "El" Higgins during and after attending a dangerous and magical boarding school for wizards named after the magic school Scholomance from Romanian folklore.
series4 books2022
similar byfantasysecondary worldyoung adult
Belladonna is Adalyn Grace's gothic YA fantasy series opening with Belladonna (2022), followed by Foxglove and Wisteria, plus the companion novella Holly. Set in a haunted, death-adjacent version of the era, it follows an orphaned heiress entangled with Death itself as she investigates the murders and mysteries surrounding her inherited estate. It blends romance, ghost story and whodunit within one continuing story.
series6 books2020
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Kerri Maniscalco's trilogy follows Emilia, a Sicilian witch whose twin sister is murdered by a serial killer targeting witches, forcing her into an uneasy bargain with Wrath, one of the seven princes of Hell, to hunt the culprit. Kingdom of the Wicked and its sequels, Kingdom of the Cursed and Kingdom of the Feared, escalate from that investigation into a wider entanglement with the political rivalries of Hell itself. The series pairs a murder-mystery hook with a slow-burn romance between Emilia and Wrath.
series14 books2015
similar byfantasydarktensesecondary worldyoung adult
Red Queen is set in a world split between Reds, an oppressed servant class, and Silvers, a ruling class with superhuman abilities, where a Red girl discovers she has Silver-like powers of her own and is forced into the royal court to hide what she is. Victoria Aveyard's debut novel opens a four-book main sequence - Red Queen, Glass Sword, King's Cage, War Storm - plus the interstitial novella Cruel Crown and the epilogue novella Broken Throne. It's YA dystopian fantasy built around a class-based magic system and a slow-burn political rebellion.
series2 books2020
similar byfantasysecondary worldyoung adult+2 more
Marie Rutkoski's The Midnight Lie is set in the world of her Winner's Trilogy: Nirrim lives in the Ward, a district of the city ruled by a harsh tribunal that reserves every pleasure and privilege for the High Kith, until a rakish traveler named Sid arrives with rumors that magic could be hers if she's willing to give up the life she knows. The Hollow Heart continues Nirrim and Sid's story.