The best fantasy novels to achieve dazzling feats of storytelling

Guy Gavriel Kay is widely known and admired for his sweeping, epic fantasy novels, all set in fantastical version of real historical countries—but before he turned to that genre, he wrote the Fionavar Trilogy. 

Think Lord of the Rings with critical differences: the characters all have a wry sense of humor and an appreciation of irony and many of those characters are women, strong, intelligent, fierce, complex women. Kay also goes for broke as a storyteller here; you can almost hear him wondering, “Can I pull this off?” And he does it every single time.

Is this a nine-book series? Well, yes. Sort of. It’s also a four-book series, then a duology, then a trilogy.  And the first four are set in the Pleistocene. Stay with me. 

May commits to world-building that encompasses ESP—but taken to 11; time-travel; international, intergenerational, and intergalactic political intrigue; powerful familial and romantic relationships; gut-wrenching tragedy, and the transcendence that compassion can make possible. 

To say there is a large cast of characters doesn’t begin to convey how many richly imagined, memorable creatures (not all human) populate these books; the main characters, in particular, are absolutely indelible, by turns terrifying, seductive, tortured, and quietly extraordinary. 

Bujold is rightly known as a master of Sci-fi thanks to her Vorkosigan saga, but this novel, the second in her World of the Five Gods series, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and rightly so. 

It tells the story of Ista, a middle-aged (yes, you read that right) woman recovering from unimaginable tragedy, betrayal, and what felt like madness (all explored in the previous book, The Curse of Chalion). Ista is certain that she’s been released from her past too late for her life to have meaning or joy, but a certain trickster god and two gallant, handsome brothers will prove her spectacularly wrong. Turning every page is a joy.

Imagine Gaiman’s pitch for American Gods: I’m going to write a book about what happened to the gods that immigrants to this country brought with them then abandoned, the gods we’ve since created and begun to worship, and the gods who have been here all along. 

There are 100—1000—ways that this unbelievably ambitious, complex, layered, and resonant story could have gone wrong, and it would be enough that it doesn’t.  But Gaiman isn’t content just to successfully tell a huge story. He also nestles an intimate, deeply personal story of one man’s self-discovery at the heart of American Gods, and never lets his hero—Shadow—get lost in the cavernous spaces of history, belief, and power that he traverses.

When I recommend this series (as I do regularly), I don’t go with the obvious description: “imagine Harry Potter meets Sherlock Holmes.”  

I mean, sure, these books follow British police detective Peter Grant as he learns magic and pursues criminals both human and not.  But they also throw our hero up against an insidious—and uniquely British—master villain and bring the landscape of London itself to life—literally. 

And the real wonder is that Aaronovitch’s brilliant world-building would be nothing without the real magic that is Peter’s voice: smart, perceptive, observant, and often infused with wonder that he invites the reader to share.