Top 25 Best Fantasy Books

Love fantasy novels? Hate wasting time reading trash? Then read this definitive guide to the top 25 Fantasy books in the genre. Updated 2015

This is a list of books that are the crème de la crème of the fantasy genre. I've carefully chosen the top 25 fantasy books from among hundreds of series and thousands of books. In my 20 or so years of devouring fantasy books, certain fantasy books have really stood out far above the rest. This is a list of those books.

The Top 25 Fantasy Books list selects from among a wide range of fantasy, from epic fantasy to detective fantasy, from well-known fantasy to obscure fantasy, and from old "classic" fantasy books to the best of later year's (2014) fantasy releases. The goal of this list is to present as broad a selection of the best fantasy literature from different fantasy subgenres -- cult hits, best sellers, critically acclaimed, and classics. This is the web's number one fantasy list, visited by millions of readers over the seven years it's been kicking around.

To include is to exclude, and alas, this list is short, and the number of fantasy books out there is huge. If my omission of your favorite author offends, my apologies, but you can’t please everyone. For each fantasy book recommendation given, I try to give some compelling reasons why the book stands out as one of the best fantasy books in the genre, rather than just saying "this is one of the best fantasy books ever." I acknowledge that judging books is like judging beauty: it's in the eye of the beholder. Some people may like a book, while others do not.

2015 Update

It’s been several years since I have updated this list, and now I bring the 2015 perspective to this update.



A lot has changed in the two years since this list has been updated. Fantasy has continued to grow up and gotten much more…complicated.

"Black and white fantasy'? So…last decade! Grim dark is vogue and antiheroes now the rage. And speaking of fantasy heroes, when they are not generally facking shit up and being all anti-heroish, then they better have a serious flaw or twelve.

And hey, who wants just an regular old evil villain when we can have a sympathetic baddie that can still tug on those old heart strings while also filling in part time as a malicious serial killer – you know, that mass murdering dark wizard who takes a breather between murders to feed soup to orphans then goes back to ravaging women and killing puppies.

There has of course been an endless deluge of the written word: new books, sad books, good books, bad books – but mostly bad books. Supposedly, there’s a publishing revolution, of sorts, with Amazon’s push into self-publishing. While this has resulted in a vast flood of new indie books, the reality is that for every self-published gem that gets picked up and made into the next best thing, there’s a veritable mountain of horrid prose, painful typos, and dreadful plots to sift through first.