My Top Ten Fantasy Novels

by Kate Elliott

To be clear, I don’t have a fixed top ten fantasy novels. It would more like a top fifty, depending on my mood and the season or the year. I do understand the utility of “top ten” lists. I like them if I want to say “the Chinese historical drama Nirvana in Fire is one of my top ten tv shows ever” without specifying what the other nine shows are. Such lists are also a great way to highlight books that I might hope to convince people to read. We are so fortunate in our literature (and art, more broadly). There are books I’ve not yet read that I will think are excellent when I do read them, and books that I loved once that don’t read as well to me decades later. It’s all a churn. So, this week, here are ten excellent fantasy novels (or series) and why I think they are worthy of a mention in a “top ten” list. Listed in publication order.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

I read LotR for the first time when I was 13. The iconic story and the breadth and depth of the world building turned my youthful reading world upside down. It’s safe to say this is the book that has had the most influence on my life in the sense that I became a writer in part because I yearned to find a way to write a story that would have the same impact on others as LotR had on me, and not just because as a teen I desperately sought a portal that would take me to Middle Earth. The trilogy holds up after all these years, a true classic.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

This novel isn’t fantasy in the commercial fiction sense commonly used in the publishing industry, but it does involve an abandoned boy who escapes a violent attack on his home village by fleeing into the Bush of Ghosts and what happens to him amid the ghosts and creatures who inhabit the perilous heart of the forest wilderness that lies beyond cultivated lands. By turns surreal and scary, it is unlike any other novel I’ve ever read. A compelling, mythic story.

The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs

Best known for his children’s fantasy, John Bellairs also wrote this slim fantasy novel for adults. Wizards Prospero (“and not the one you’re thinking of”) and Roger Bacon discover a malevolent presence is raising something evil in the world, and only they can stop him. Bellairs has the gift of combining humor and dry wit, and a deep sense of the two men’s friendship, with a sense of mounting dread, accomplished through deeply observed scenes rather than through blood and gore. One of the scariest books I’ve ever read, and with a satisfying ending. I wish it were more widely known.

The Mythago Wood sequence by Robert Holdstock

Holdstock also explores the labyrinthine paths of a deep forest, in this case Ryhope Wood in Britain, where mythic forces exist outside of time. Mythago Wood is the first novel of the sequence (not a series, but rather related novels in the same overall setting), and it is excellent. My favorite is Lavondyss, in which a young woman enters the wood to find her long-lost brother, but she will be changed by her journey, and she will change the wood as well. Resonant work, as if someone rang a bell in your heart.

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

I could have said The Earthsea Cycle, and maybe I ought to, since Le Guin’s lucid prose and keen eye for what makes us human saturates all the books in the cycle (five novels and one collection). But I want to highlight Tehanu, which back in the day rejected the stereotypical focus on highborn people (usually men) involved in high-level politics and war to follow the story of an old woman living an ordinary life doing ordinary things, who rescues a child. The story offers the reader a chance to follow into old age the fates of two characters met in earlier volumes. More than that, it subverts the typical notion of what and who count as heroic, in brilliant form. 

The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells

Martha Wells is having a big moment with her Murderbot books (and Apple TV+ series, out now—it’s great!). She’s also written a number of fantasy novels, all of them good. I want to highlight The Cloud Roads and its sequels (five novels and two collections) which feature some of the most staggeringly original world building I have ever read: a world of many sapient species who live in various ecological niches. Come for the wonderful “who am I?” journey of our hero, Moon, and stay for the splendid ingenuity of Wells’ endlessly inventive imagination. 

The Dandelion Dynasty by Ken Liu

When people talk about epic fantasy, it doesn’t get more epic than Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings and its three sequels. Liu blends epic sensibilities (Western and Chinese) to create a story that not only pulls from both traditions but which also layers the idea of cultural conflict, change, and adaptation into the story itself, over about one hundred years. The society we reach at the end of the story is both recognizable and also deeply altered from the society we enter at the beginning. Liu examines so many aspects of societal change from the smallest scale to the largest. His characters are memorable, and no one is safe. I still think about their personal stories, those that end well and those that end tragically. I consider this a genuinely innovative sequence (the story is even specifically about technological and cultural innovation as well!).

The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee

What if a crime family in an East Asian inspired fantasy island city had access to magical martial arts powers and were engaged in a long-standing turf war with a rival crime syndicate? Lee’s Jade City and its two sequels ask and answer this question. Lee brilliantly sets her story in an equivalent of the second half of our 20th century (although it is not our world). This allows her to follow the characters across decades of societal, cultural, diaspora, political, and technological change both in terms of their personal lives and in terms of how subsequent generations adapt to and make decisions about the family business they’ve been born into. Great stuff.

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Vampires or zombies? Eh, I’m a “neither one, thanks” reader. Dread Nation is an exception. Ireland uses the backdrop of a 19th century America in which the Civil War was interrupted by a zombie plague to tell the story of a world in which Black and indigenous children are trained to fight shamblers so white citizens can live as undisturbed by the outbreak as possible. This is a searing examination of America’s history of racism and inequality, and it is also a rip-roaring adventure story that opens in the East and travels into the West. My recommended zombie read!

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

How many fantasy novels do you know of which are set in the medieval Indian Ocean culture-sphere? Retired pirate Amina has to get the old gang together for one more job in a world where supernatural creatures, curses, and magic all coexist with ordinary life (and just wait until you meet her ex-husband!). This rich setting is based on the real history and cultures of the region. My medievalist sister calls it one of the best evocations of historical pre-modern life she’s ever read, so you don’t have to just take my word for it!