When reality gets too heavy to bear, I sometimes like to shake off the dust of this mundane world and run headlong into the realm of fantasy. Sadly, fantasy worlds aren’t as easy to get to as isekai anime would have me believe. When an anime protagonist gets hit by a truck, they wake up in a land of magic and wonder. Whenever I try it, I wake up in the hospital. Doctor’s orders demand that I get my fantasy fixes through books instead.
So here they are, the 10 best fantasy books for adults that will whisk you away to a better—well, maybe not better, but certainly cooler—world without risking your life to do it.
10. The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
Set in a mythical world inspired by imperial China, Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune centers around a young noblewoman who is condemned to live out her days in the court of a tyrant. After her brothers were killed and the rebellion crushed, In-yo was forced into a political marriage with the Emperor of Pines and Steel. A stranger in a strange and hostile land, In-yo has to use her wits to survive the ever-shifting political landscapes of life in an imperial palace. Her only friend is a handmaiden named Rabbit, and the pair work together to bring a monarchy to its knees. It’s a feminist mediation on power and subjugation with a fantastic twist ending. It’s also stacked with queer characters including a non-binary cleric and a lesbian fortune-telling spy—a big plus.
9. The Dark Tower by Stephen King
While Stephen King might be known as the King of Horror, he began his career as a fiction writer by laying the foundation for one of the greatest fantasy epics ever created. Starting with The Gunslinger when he was just 19, King tells the story of pistol-packing knight-errant Roland Deschain, who is on a hero’s quest to locate the mythical Dark Tower hidden in the wasteland. Inspired by Robert Browning’s 19th-century narrative poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, King lays the bricks of a towering series that serves as the central hub of his multiverse. While the series is best enjoyed after reading King’s classics like It, Salem’s Lot, and The Stand, The Dark Tower works as a beautiful standalone and bizarre tale of chivalric honor twisted by obsession. The Gunslinger and its sequels shoot straight for the heart and don’t miss.
8. The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy begins at the world’s end and builds it anew. The series begins with The Fifth Season, named after the period of cataclysmic climate change that occurs every few centuries on the world’s sole remaining supercontinent, the Stillness. The peoples of the Stillness are divided into strict castes, with the energy-controlling orogenes at the bottom. Orogenes are hated, oppressed, and sometimes murdered outright by other castes fearful of their nascent power. After an orogene unleashes the Fifth Season in a state of rage, the story follows three orogene women and their perilous quest to cross the hostile continent. The Broken Earth series features some of the most rich and original world-building on this list, and threads a painfully poignant story of survival across its ruined landscapes.
7. The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
Inspired by the mythical ghost-city that appears in the Middle Eastern folk epic One Thousand and One Nights, S. A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass tells the tale of Nahri, an orphan girl who ekes out a living swindling Ottoman nobles in 18th-century Cairo. After performing what she thinks is a fake exorcism, Nahri inadvertently summons a very real djinn who tells her that she is the distant descendant of a family who ruled the djinn from their ancestral home of Daevabad. Nahri journeys across the wilderness with the djinn to return to her long-lost home and becomes swept up in the endless political plotting of the mythical city’s spiritual rulers. When I say “spiritual,” I don’t mean sorcerors or priests, but bonafide spirits that are clever, ancient, and dangerous.
6. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
Before HBO turned it into a sweeping pop-culture phenomenon, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire was a series of dense, brutal, and somewhat obscure books whose first entry has been in print since the ’90s. Beginning with the now household name A Game of Thrones, Martin creates a decadent and devious fantasy world following decades of research. The series’ scope is magnificent as Martin weaves a world-spanning tapestry full of powerful dynasties, ancient magics, and endless conflict. While the books’ brutality sometimes gets the better of the narrative itself, it’s an unmissable fantasy series, the power of which hasn’t been seen since a nerdy linguist born in South Africa wrote a book about hairy-footed heroes that changed the course of fantasy forever.
5. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles eschews the sweep of fantasy epics to tell a raw, intimate story of young, doomed love. Borrowing from Homer’s Iliad, The Song of Achilles reimagines the romance between a mythical demigod and his fragile human lover. Exiled from his kingdom while still a child, the young Patroclus meets Achilles while living under the care of a fatherly king, and they plant the seeds of a friendship that blossoms into an achingly beautiful love. If you’ve read anything by the ancient Greeks, you’ll know that this story won’t end well. It’s not the tragic end that makes the story of these two star-crossed lovers so devastating, but all the tender moments it took to get there. Guided by prose that sings as sweetly as a Jeff Buckley ballad, you will spend the last 50 pages of this book sobbing—and you will love every second of it.
4. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Also known as The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind tells the story of a hero whose best days are behind him. In the country town of Newarre, there lives a mild-mannered innkeeper named Kote, who, though you wouldn’t know by looking at him, was once the greatest swordsman, wizard, and musician in all the land. He may or may not have killed a king. He sings a ballad that could make a dragon cry. And he could cross swords with gods and come out unscathed. Listening to Kote tell the tale of his former glories is undeniably satisfying. It’s a refreshing and unforgettable break from reality and a look into the face of greatness, gently lined with age.
3. The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin may have established herself as a gender-binary-breaking sci-fi writer with The Left Hand of Darkness, but she was a fantastic fantasy writer, too. Set in an archipelago that spans the globe, Earthsea centers around the story of Ged, the bronze-smith’s boy from nowhere, destined to become the greatest wizard the world has ever seen. While Ged fights his fair share of dragons and denizens of darkness, he spends the majority of his life attempting to live in balance with the natural world. It’s a deeply philosophical story of maintaining equilibrium with nature, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of demon-fighting and dragon slaying to keep things riveting, too.
2. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials is my favorite fantasy series, and it centers around one little girl’s quest to kill God (I can’t think of a cooler tagline than that). Lyra Belacqua lives in a world almost but not quite like Edwardian England—the main differences lie in the fact that an evil church known as the Magestirium rules the world, except for the talking polar bears that have their kingdom in the far north. After discovering a secret that threatens to shake the church’s theological foundation to its core, young Lyra embarks on a dimension-hopping quest to unravel the secrets of the multiverse. She meets kindly witches, gay angels, and a boy her age from a parallel world with whom she falls desperately in love. That’s what His Dark Materials is about—love. It rewrites thousands of years of religious dogma to tell a tale where romantic love is not the source of humanity’s sin but what makes us truly divine.
1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Beowulf are some of the greatest fantasy epics of all time. Who would have guessed that a nerdy English professor and his story of a little hairy-footed hero and his courageous gardener would be counted among them? Like any self-respecting Hobbit’s epic journey, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings doesn’t begin the way you expect it to (it starts with a genealogy lesson, after all) but unfolds into the most singularly profound myth of the modern age. Ancient evils, lost kings, contentious elf/dwarf relations, talking trees, weed-smoking wizards who dazzle in white robes—The Lord of Rings isn’t just the best fantasy has to offer; it MADE modern fantasy itself. Without this series, none of the other books on this list would arguably exist, and it’s all thanks to an armchair linguist who thought of myriad ways for elves to conjugate verbs, among other things.
