Fantasy Worlds You Won't Want to Leave

Le Guin's first Earthsea novel — in which a young wizard's pride unleashes a shadow creature he must pursue to the ends of the world — is more psychologically sophisticated than most adult fiction. Ged's quest is explicitly about integrating the parts of yourself you refuse to acknowledge. The prose is spare and precise, the world-building complete, and the moral vision is Le Guin's most direct.

Kvothe — the most gifted student the Arcanum has ever seen, the musician who played for kings, the warrior who may have called down lightning — is telling his story in an inn while the world falls apart around him. Rothfuss's prose is the most purely pleasurable in contemporary fantasy: every sentence reads as if it was revised a hundred times until it was exactly right. The Kingkiller Chronicle's first volume sets a standard few series have matched.

Jemisin won three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel — unprecedented — with the Broken Earth trilogy, beginning here. The world is geologically unstable; some people can control seismic forces and are feared, enslaved, and killed for it. Jemisin tells the story in second person — you — which is technically difficult and emotionally devastating when you understand why. The most formally ambitious and politically serious fantasy of the 2010s.

An angel and a demon who've been on Earth since the Beginning have, over 6,000 years, grown rather fond of humanity and decide to sabotage the Apocalypse. Pratchett and Gaiman's collaborative novel is the funniest fantasy ever written and also a genuinely moving meditation on free will, friendship, and whether good and evil are as binary as theology insists. Every page has at least one line that makes you read it aloud to whoever's nearby.

Clarke spent 10 years writing this novel about the return of magic to Napoleonic England, and every one of those years is evident. The world-building is done entirely through footnotes, letters, and historical allusions to a fictional magical tradition, and the result is the most convincingly realised alternate history in fantasy literature. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are among the most fully human characters the genre has produced.

Gaiman's premise is irresistible: the gods that immigrants brought to America from the old countries are still alive but fading, sustained by belief that grows thinner every year, while new gods of media and technology grow fat and powerful. Shadow Moon's road trip across the American heartland is part con-artist thriller, part meditation on myth and belonging, and part genuine love letter to the strange, overlooked parts of the country.

Sanderson has become the most prolific and reliable constructor of epic fantasy systems in the world, and The Way of Kings — first in the planned ten-book Stormlight Archive — is his masterwork. Roshar is a world shaped by constant catastrophic storms; the magic systems are among the most inventively constrained in the genre; and the three main characters each carry the kind of moral weight that makes you genuinely worry about their choices.

Pratchett's most philosophical Discworld novel — and the one most readable as standalone — imagines a great god reduced to a tortoise because people worship the Church rather than the deity itself. It's a comedy about faith and institutional religion that is more theologically sophisticated than most serious religious literature, and it ends with a chapter that is genuinely moving even on re-reads.

Clarke's second novel is only 272 pages and utterly unlike anything else: a man lives in an infinite house of labyrinthine halls and tidal statues, and he's trying to figure out who he is and how he got there. The mystery unfolds with such precision that every revelation completely recontextualises everything you've already read. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction and is the most perfect novel published in the 2020s.

Le Guin's first Earthsea novel — in which a young wizard's pride unleashes a shadow creature he must pursue to the ends of the world — is more psychologically sophisticated than most adult fiction. Ged's quest is explicitly about integrating the parts of yourself you refuse to acknowledge. The prose is spare and precise, the world-building complete, and the moral vision is Le Guin's most direct.

Kvothe — the most gifted student the Arcanum has ever seen, the musician who played for kings, the warrior who may have called down lightning — is telling his story in an inn while the world falls apart around him. Rothfuss's prose is the most purely pleasurable in contemporary fantasy: every sentence reads as if it was revised a hundred times until it was exactly right. The Kingkiller Chronicle's first volume sets a standard few series have matched.

Jemisin won three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel — unprecedented — with the Broken Earth trilogy, beginning here. The world is geologically unstable; some people can control seismic forces and are feared, enslaved, and killed for it. Jemisin tells the story in second person — you — which is technically difficult and emotionally devastating when you understand why. The most formally ambitious and politically serious fantasy of the 2010s.

An angel and a demon who've been on Earth since the Beginning have, over 6,000 years, grown rather fond of humanity and decide to sabotage the Apocalypse. Pratchett and Gaiman's collaborative novel is the funniest fantasy ever written and also a genuinely moving meditation on free will, friendship, and whether good and evil are as binary as theology insists. Every page has at least one line that makes you read it aloud to whoever's nearby.

Clarke spent 10 years writing this novel about the return of magic to Napoleonic England, and every one of those years is evident. The world-building is done entirely through footnotes, letters, and historical allusions to a fictional magical tradition, and the result is the most convincingly realised alternate history in fantasy literature. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are among the most fully human characters the genre has produced.

Gaiman's premise is irresistible: the gods that immigrants brought to America from the old countries are still alive but fading, sustained by belief that grows thinner every year, while new gods of media and technology grow fat and powerful. Shadow Moon's road trip across the American heartland is part con-artist thriller, part meditation on myth and belonging, and part genuine love letter to the strange, overlooked parts of the country.

Sanderson has become the most prolific and reliable constructor of epic fantasy systems in the world, and The Way of Kings — first in the planned ten-book Stormlight Archive — is his masterwork. Roshar is a world shaped by constant catastrophic storms; the magic systems are among the most inventively constrained in the genre; and the three main characters each carry the kind of moral weight that makes you genuinely worry about their choices.

Pratchett's most philosophical Discworld novel — and the one most readable as standalone — imagines a great god reduced to a tortoise because people worship the Church rather than the deity itself. It's a comedy about faith and institutional religion that is more theologically sophisticated than most serious religious literature, and it ends with a chapter that is genuinely moving even on re-reads.

Clarke's second novel is only 272 pages and utterly unlike anything else: a man lives in an infinite house of labyrinthine halls and tidal statues, and he's trying to figure out who he is and how he got there. The mystery unfolds with such precision that every revelation completely recontextualises everything you've already read. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction and is the most perfect novel published in the 2020s.