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- Throne of Glass
series15 books2012
similar bysecondary worldyoung adult+4 more
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.
- This Woven Kingdom
series4 books2022
similar bypolitical intriguesecondary worldromantasyyoung adult+3 more
Tahereh Mafi's This Woven Kingdom follows Alizeh, a servant girl who is secretly the long-lost heir to an ancient Jinn kingdom, and Kamran, the human crown prince drawn to her despite prophecies foretelling his own king's downfall. The series continues across These Infinite Threads, All This Twisted Glory, and Every Spiral of Fate.
- Lightlark
series6 books2022
similar bytensesecondary worldyoung adult+4 more
Alex Aster's Lightlark saga is set on an island where six realms, each bound by an old curse, converge only once a century for a deadly game that could break their curses for good. It centers on Isla Crowe, ruler of a realm cursed with a monstrous secret, as she navigates rival rulers and a dangerous bond with the Wildling ruler Grim. The main sequence continues across further novels alongside companion novellas set in the same world.
- An Ember in the Ashes
series4 books2015
similar bytensesecondary worldfantasyyoung adult+2 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.
- A Song of Ice and Fire
series14 books1996
part of World of Ice and Fire
similar bypolitical intriguesecondary worldfantasy+1 more
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 Powerless Trilogy
series5 books2023
similar bysecondary worldfantasyromantasyyoung adult+2 more
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.
- The Hurricane Wars
series3 books2023
similar bytensesecondary worldromantasyenemies to lovers+1 more
Thea Guanzon's romantic fantasy trilogy follows a sorceress and a prince from warring nations forced into an uneasy alliance against a shared magical threat, its central pairing reworked from the author's own Star Wars fan fiction into an original world drawn from Southeast Asian and Philippine myth. Across The Hurricane Wars, A Monsoon Rising, and This Shattered Tempest, the truce between the two leads is tested as old loyalties and new dangers collide.
- Legacy of Orisha
series3 books2018
similar bysecondary worldfantasyyoung adult+4 more
Tomi Adeyemi's Legacy of Orïsha trilogy opens with Children of Blood and Bone, following Zélie, a girl from a persecuted caste of former magic-users, on a quest to restore magic to a kingdom that outlawed and hunted her people. Children of Virtue and Vengeance and Children of Anguish and Anarchy continue the fallout of that restoration as new factions fight over who gets to wield the returned power. The series draws on West African mythology and languages for its magic system and setting.
- Winner's Trilogy
series4 books2014
similar bytensepolitical intriguesecondary worldfantasyyoung adult+2 more
- The Remnant Chronicles Universe
series6 books2014
similar bypolitical intriguesecondary worldfantasyyoung adult+3 more
- Witches Steeped in Gold
series2 books2021
similar bytensepolitical intriguesecondary worldfantasyyoung adultenemies to lovers
- Red Queen
series14 books2015
similar bytensesecondary worldfantasyyoung adult+1 more
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.
- Shattered Sea
series4 books2014
similar bysecondary worldfantasyyoung adult+2 more
Shattered Sea is a young adult fantasy series written by the British author Joe Abercrombie. The trilogy was published by Del Rey in the United States and Harper Voyager in the UK.
- The Codex Alera
series6 books2004
similar bytensepolitical intriguesecondary worldfantasy+1 more
Furies of Calderon opens The Codex Alera in a Rome-flavored fantasy world where nearly everyone commands elemental spirits called furies, except Tavi, a teenager with none, whose resourcefulness becomes the series' recurring answer to raw magical power. Jim Butcher's six-book series, continuing through Academ's Fury, Cursor's Fury, Captain's Fury, Princeps' Fury, and First Lord's Fury, builds from small-scale political maneuvering into full-scale war.
- Malazan Book of the Fallen
series20 books1999
part of Malazan
similar bysecondary worldfantasy+2 more
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.
- Malazan
universe36 books1999
Start hereMalazan Book of the Fallen · Start here
similar bysecondary world+3 more
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.
- The Riftwar Universe
universe44 books1982
Start hereRiftwar Saga · Start here
similar bysecondary worldfantasy+2 more
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.
- Lightbringer
series5 books2010
similar bysecondary world+4 more
The Black Prism introduces Gavin Guile, the Prism — supreme religious and political authority over the Seven Satrapies, and the only person able to draft every color of magical light into solid, structural "luxin" — as an uprising and a hidden family secret both threaten to unravel the fragile peace he's built. Brent Weeks's five-book Lightbringer series pushes its chromaturgy magic system toward its physical and moral limits: drafters who overuse their color eventually "break the halo" and turn into monsters called wights.
