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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.
universe44 books1982
Start hereRiftwar Saga · Start here
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On the world of Midkemia a tear opens in the air itself, a rift hung between stars, and through it march the armies of an empire from another world entirely. So begins the chronicle Raymond E. Feist has kept for three decades: the tale of Pug, a castle kitchen boy apprenticed to a magician on the very day the invasion lands, and of Tomas, his friend, who inherits the armor and the ancient fury of a dead dragon-lord. Around these two the Riftwar Cycle turns, widening book by book from one besieged frontier keep into the whole history of a world of kingdoms, guilds, thieves' dens and mage-towers. The cycle runs to roughly thirty novels, gathered into arcs a newcomer can enter and finish on their own. The founding Riftwar Saga (Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon) sets the board; the Serpentwar Saga, Krondor's Sons and the Conclave of Shadows carry the story down the generations; the Darkwar, Demonwar and Chaoswar sagas bring it toward its close. Crossing the rift to the rival world of Kelewan, Feist and Janny Wurts wrote the Empire trilogy, opening with Daughter of the Empire, a court intrigue told wholly from the invaders' side and for many the finest thing here. Shorter Legends of the Riftwar and the game-born Riftwar Legacy fill the corners; later still, Feist opens an altogether new world in the Firemane books. Feist writes fantasy in its most companionable key: apprentices who grow into archmages, tavern boys who become spies and dukes, a world you return to the way you return to an old inn. The mood is adventure before dread, friendship and rank and hard-won craft, wars that cost something, all of it rendered plainly and at a gallop. Begin where it began, with Magician, then follow the arcs in the order they were written, and the rift will carry you the rest of the way.
series6 books1988
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The Dragon Prince and Dragon Star trilogies comprise six connected fantasy novels written by Melanie Rawn. The Dragon Prince trilogy focuses on Prince Rohan of the Desert and his Sunrunner wife, Sioned, while the Dragon Star trilogy focuses on their son, Pol. The Dragon Prince trilogy consists of novels Dragon Prince, The Star Scroll, and Sunrunner's Fire. The books in the Dragon Star trilogy are Stronghold, The Dragon Token, and Skybowl.
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.
series3 books1976
part of Deryni
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Legends of Saint Camber tells the story of Camber MacRorie, a Deryni lord who helps restore a persecuted human dynasty to the throne of Gwynedd and is venerated as a saint after his death, at a cost the trilogy gradually reveals. Camber of Culdi, Saint Camber, and Camber the Heretic were published as the fourth Deryni novel onward but are set two centuries before Katherine Kurtz's original Chronicles of the Deryni trilogy. They lay the groundwork - persecution of Deryni magic-users - that shapes the political and religious world of everything published earlier in reading order.
Kristine Kathryn Ruschstandalone novel1993
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Stashie is a heart reader. She wields a dangerous magic: one that reveals the truth at the heart of a person. So when the old king needs to know which of his sons has he pure heart, and which must be killed, he turns to heart readers to tell him the truth. But Stashie is a victim of vicious Gerneral Tarne, the country's military leader. The empire's killing machine ruined her life - this is her chance for revenge.
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.
Kristine Kathryn Ruschstandalone novel1991
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Synopsis -An innocent excited boy, a prince and heir, takes his first journey to the city. It is like nothing he imagined. Hands pound against his carriage: voices call for a coin, Sir just one, spare me some money, sir, I haven’t eaten in days. The streets teem with merchants in velvet robes, magicians, half mad preachers, with life and colour and noise. He doesn’t want to miss any of it. But it is the last journey of his life as a prince. Soon he will be abandoned and declared dead. Soon with survival and what will be the driving force of his life: the quest to recover his stolen inheritance, his usurped throne. His home. A story of cities and palaces, of power hungry lords and ladies scheming inside a magically threatened land...Intricate, compelling.
series3 books2010
part of Kyralia series
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Trudi Canavan is an Australian writer of fantasy novels, best known for her best-selling fantasy trilogies The Black Magician and Age of the Five. While establishing her writing career she worked as a graphic designer. She completed her third trilogy, The Traitor Spy trilogy, in August 2012 with The Traitor Queen. Subsequently, Canavan has written a series called Millennium's Rule, with a completely new setting consisting of multiple worlds which characters can cross between. Though originally planned as a trilogy, a fourth and final book in the Millennium's Rule series was published.
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.
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.
series4 books1970
part of Deryni
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Katherine Kurtz's Chronicles of the Deryni trilogy (Deryni Rising, Deryni Checkmate, High Deryni, 1970-1973) follows the young King Kelson Haldane defending his throne in Gwynedd, a kingdom modeled on 10th-to-12th-century Britain, against ecclesiastical opposition and foreign invasion. Central to the conflict is the Deryni, a persecuted human-like people with inherited psychic and magical powers, whose presence in and around the crown makes Kelson's reign a lightning rod for religious and political tension.
series10 books2000
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The Hythrun Chronicles is a fantasy set of novels by Australian writer Jennifer Fallon, told in two trilogies, The Demon Child Trilogy and The Wolfblade Trilogy. The Demon Child Trilogy follows R'shiel Tenragan as she accepts her fate as the demon child and tries to hold the fabric of her world together while defeating the Karien god, Xaphista, and bringing about some much-needed changes to the four main countries of Medalon, Hythria, Fardohnya and Karien with help from multiple influential characters she befriends. The Wolfblade Trilogy, set about 30 years before, follows the life of Marla Wolfblade from the age of 15 until she is in her 40s. It also follows stories of various characters intertwined with that of Marla Wolfblade and explains much of the history in The Demon Child History as it follows Damin Wolfblade and Marla's other children growing up and how the state of affairs presented in The Demon Child Trilogy came to be. There is a fifth country introduced to the trilogy as well, Denika. It is off the map and indicated as south of Hythria and Fardohnya across the Dregian Ocean, accessed by ship.
series4 books2003
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The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone is the name of a fantasy novel series by Gregory Keyes, written between 2003 and 2008. They follow the story of Anne Dare, descendant of Virginia Dare, a famed ruler who used her magic to aid the kingdom of Crotheny. Her descendants rule the kingdom until a traitorous plot to overthrow them leads to tragedy.
series4 books1922
completed
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The Zimiamvian Trilogy is a series of fantasy novels by English author E. R. Eddison.Mistress of Mistresses (1935) A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941) The Mezentian Gate (1958)
series4 books2013
part of World of Ice and Fire
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Set centuries before A Game of Thrones in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire universe, this history of House Targaryen traces the dynasty's founding, its wars, and its relationship with dragons through the voice of an in-world maester chronicler. Fire & Blood is the first of a planned two-part history, with the earlier novella The Princess and the Queen covering the dynastic civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons.
universe19 books2013
Start hereThe Powder Mage Trilogy · Start here
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Load your powder, and pray your sorcery outruns their cannon. Here the age of kings is ending at musket-point: a world where black powder is not merely fired but eaten, and the men and women called powder mages snort a pinch of it to burn a trance across the battlefield — igniting an enemy's cartridges from a mile off, bending a bullet mid-flight, reading a room by the taste of the air. Against them stand the Privileged, glove-fingered sorcerers of the old order who summon fire and frost, and above both, gods who have not finished walking the earth. Brian McClellan builds this flintlock world across two linked trilogies. The Powder Mage Trilogy — Promise of Blood, The Crimson Campaign, The Autumn Republic — opens with a field marshal's coup against a rotten monarchy and the invasion, revolution, and divine reckoning that follow. Gods of Blood and Powder — Sins of Empire, Wrath of Empire, Blood of Empire — crosses the ocean a decade on to the colonial frontier of Fatrasta, where old soldiers, spies, and a heretic goddess collide. A run of novellas and short stories fills the corners between. Expect grapeshot and gunsmoke, siege lines and back-alley intrigue, generals and con men given equal weight. Begin at Promise of Blood and read in publication order — the trilogies run in sequence, and the short work is seasoning, not prerequisite.
series15 books2012
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Throne of Glass is a epic fantasy novel series by American author Sarah J. Maas, beginning with the entry of the same name, released on August 2, 2012. The story follows the journey of Celaena Sardothien, a teenage assassin in a corrupt kingdom with a tyrannical ruler, the King of Adarlan. As the story progresses, Celaena forms unexpected bonds and uncovers a conspiracy amidst her adventures. The series concluded with the eighth book in October 2018.
series3 books2015
part of Grishaverse
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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.