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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Every reading order is hand-picked, with a rationale on the page. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Paragons

anchored on:fantasysecondary worldshort story cycleepic fantasypolitical intriguewar+1 more

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Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • A Song of Ice and Fire

                  series · 14 books · 1996

                  part of World of Ice and Fire

                  similar bysecondary worldpolitical intrigueepic fantasyfantasywardark

                  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.

                • Malazan

                  universe · 36 books · 1999

                  Start hereMalazan Book of the Fallen · Start here

                  similar bysecondary worldwarepic fantasydark+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.

                • Sparhawk

                  universe · 6 books · 1989

                  Start hereElenium · Start here

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldepic fantasyfantasy+3 more

                  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.

                • The Codex Alera

                  series · 6 books · 2004

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldpolitical intriguewarepic fantasyfantasy

                  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

                  series · 20 books · 1999

                  part of Malazan

                  similar bysecondary worldwarepic fantasydarkfantasygods+1 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.

                • The Hobbit

                  series · 2 books · 1937

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy

                  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.

                • The Grisha

                  series · 9 books · 2012

                  part of Grishaverse

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasyepic fantasy+3 more

                  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.

                • The Stormlight Archive

                  series · 15 books · 2010

                  part of Cosmere

                  similar bysecondary worldadventurousepic fantasywarfantasy+2 more

                  The Stormlight Archive is a high fantasy novel series written by American author Brandon Sanderson, planned to consist of ten novels. As of 2024, the series comprises five published novels and two novellas, set within Sanderson's broader Cosmere universe. The first novel, The Way of Kings, was published on August 31, 2010. The second novel, Words of Radiance, was published on March 4, 2014 and debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller List. This was repeated by Oathbringer and Rhythm of War. The fifth novel, Wind and Truth, was released December 6, 2024. Sanderson has indicated that he will start drafting the latter half of the series after he finishes writing the upcoming Era Three Mistborn trilogy and the two Elantris sequels. The series has been adapted as a VR Experience and a tabletop roleplaying game.

                • Dragon Age (Bioware RPG tie-in)

                  series · 21 books · 2009

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasypolitical intrigueepic fantasy+3 more

                  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 Powder Mage

                  universe · 19 books · 2013

                  Start hereThe Powder Mage Trilogy · Start here

                  similar bysecondary worldwarpolitical intrigueepic fantasyfantasy+1 more

                  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.

                • Beklan Empire

                  series · 2 books · 1974

                  completed

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasyepic fantasypolitical intriguewar+2 more

                  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.

                • The Riftwar Universe

                  universe · 44 books · 1982

                  Start hereRiftwar Saga · Start here

                  similar bysecondary worldepic fantasyfantasy+3 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.

                • The Acacia Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2007

                  similar bysecondary worldpolitical intriguewarepic fantasyfantasydark+1 more

                  Acacia: The War with the Mein begins with an empire's ruling Akaran children fleeing after assassins from an exiled people kill their father, scattering the heirs into a wider world whose comfortable myths — and the drug trade and slavery underwriting the empire's peace — turn out to be far uglier than they were raised to believe. David Anthony Durham's trilogy, continuing through The Other Lands and The Sacred Band, follows the siblings as each confronts a different piece of the empire's hidden machinery.

                • The Drenai Saga

                  series · 15 books · 1984

                  completed

                  similar bysecondary worldadventurousfantasyepic fantasywar+1 more

                  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.

                • DT
                  Dragon Trilogies

                  series · 6 books · 1988

                  similar bysecondary worldpolitical intrigueepic fantasyfantasy+2 more

                  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.

                • C
                  Corum

                  series · 6 books · 1971

                  part of Moorcock's Multiverse

                  similar bysecondary worldadventurousfantasyepic fantasy+2 more

                • Zimiamvian Trilogy

                  series · 4 books · 1922

                  completed

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasypolitical intrigueepic fantasy+1 more

                  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)

                • Riftwar Saga

                  series · 7 books · 1982

                  part of The Riftwar Universe

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldwarepic fantasyfantasy

                  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.

                • Dragon Heart

                  Cecelia Holland · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasypolitical intriguewarepic fantasy+1 more

                  Where the Cape of the Winds juts into the endless sea, there is Castle Ocean, and therein dwells the royal family that has ruled it from time immemorial. But there is an Empire growing in the east, and its forces have reached the castle. King Reymarro is dead in battle, and by the new treaty, Queen Marioza must marry one of the Emperor's brothers. She loathes the idea, and has already killed the first brother, but a second arrives, escorted by more soldiers. While Marioza delays, her youngest son, Jeon, goes on a journey in search of his mute twin, Tirza, who needs to be present for the wedding.

                • Guardians of Ga'hoole

                  series · 17 books · 2003

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldfantasywarepic fantasy

                  Guardians of Ga'Hoole is a fantasy book series written by Kathryn Lasky and published by Scholastic. The series contains a total of 16 books, and although it was originally intended to conclude with the 2008 publication of The War of the Ember, it has a prequel, The Rise of a Legend, published in 2013. Apart from the main series, there are a few more books and spin-offs set in the same universe. The first three books of the series were adapted into the 2010 animated 3D film Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, directed by Zack Snyder.

                • Elenium

                  series · 3 books · 1989

                  completed

                  part of Sparhawk

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldepic fantasyfantasy+1 more

                  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.

                • The Lord of the Rings

                  series · 13 books · 1954

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

                  similar bysecondary worldepic fantasy+3 more

                  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.

                • The Dreamers

                  series · 5 books · 2003

                  completed

                  similar byadventuroussecondary worldwarepic fantasyfantasygods

                  The Dreamers is the title of a fantasy book series by American writer David Eddings and his wife Leigh Eddings. The story revolves around four beings known as The Elder Gods residing in the land of Dhrall: Dahlaine of the North, Veltan of the South, Zelana of the West and Aracia of the East. They must recruit the help of outlanders to destroy the fiendish Vlagh and prevent its attempt at world conquest. The Elder Gods are not permitted to use their powers to kill, but the young Dreamers can use their dreams to predict and affect the future.

                • The Poppy War

                  series · 4 books · 2018

                  similar bysecondary worldwarepic fantasydarkfantasy+2 more

                  The Poppy War follows Rin, a war orphan who tests into an elite military academy and discovers a talent for shamanic power tied to a pantheon of vengeful gods. R. F. Kuang's trilogy reworks the Second Sino-Japanese War and its atrocities into an epic fantasy that grows darker and more morally compromised as it goes. It's told across The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, and The Burning God.