Famous and Beloved Fantasy Novels

Famous and Beloved Fantasy Novels

Books in list (26)


Title: Lord Foul's Bane (First Chronicles Series #1)

The first book in one of the most remarkable epic fantasies ever written, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever.
He called himself Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever because he dared not believe in the strange alternate world in which he suddenly found himself. Yet he was tempted to believe, to fight for the Land, to be the reincarnation of its greatest hero....
THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT THE UNBELIEVER Book One: LORD FOUL'S BANE Book Two: THE ILLEARTH WAR Book Three: THE POWER THAT PRESERVES

Only one man can save the people from unending horror and evil; but if he fails, he and his pupils will die a hideous death.

Author(s): Stephen R. Donaldson
ISBN 13: 9780345348654
Pages: 496

Title: I, Robot

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Isaac Asimov found a home on the pages of the science-fiction magazines Astounding and Super-Science Stories. World War II had just ended and the world was obsessed with air combat and the role of technology in society. Asimov’s stories reflected the concerns over the danger of technology but they also humanized robots, indicating that it is not technology that is evil but the way it is sometimes abused. His stories were so successful that in 1950 nine of his best short stories were selected for publication as the book I, Robot. In this book you get such greats as:

  • Catch That Rabbit
  • Runaround
  • The Evitable Conflict
  • Robbie
These classics revolutionized science fiction, and just a few years later, in 1957, Asimov’s birth country would forever change history by launching the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik.

If you like this book, you may also enjoy Asimov’s full-length featuresThe Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, also available in eBook format.
Author(s): Isaac Asimov
ISBN 13: 9780553382563
Pages: 256
This book is in (4) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Howl's Moving Castle

In the land of Ingary, such things as spells, invisible cloaks, and seven-league boots were everyday things. The Witch of the Waste was another matter.

After fifty years of quiet, it was rumored that the Witch was about to terrorize the country again. So when a moving black castle, blowing dark smoke from its four thin turrets, appeared on the horizon, everyone thought it was the Witch. The castle, however, belonged to Wizard Howl, who, it was said, liked to suck the souls of young girls.

The Hatter sisters—Sophie, Lettie, and Martha—and all the other girls were warned not to venture into the streets alone. But that was only the beginning.

In this giant jigsaw puzzle of a fantasy, people and things are never quite what they seem. Destinies are intertwined, identities exchanged, lovers confused. The Witch has placed a spell on Howl. Does the clue to breaking it lie in a famous poem? And what will happen to Sophie Hatter when she enters Howl's castle?

Diana Wynne Jones's entrancing fantasy is filled with surprises at every turn, but when the final stormy duel between the Witch and the Wizard is finished, all the pieces fall magically into place.

Eldest of three sisters in a land where it is considered to be a misfortune, Sophie is resigned to her fate as a hat shop apprentice until a witch turns her into an old woman and she finds herself in the castle of the greatly feared wizard Howl.

Author(s): Diana Wynne Jones
ISBN 13: 9780061478789
Pages: 429

Title: Dragonflight (Dragonriders of Pern Series #1)

HOW CAN ONE GIRL SAVE AN ENTIRE WORLD?

To the nobles who live in Benden Weyr, Lessa is nothing but a ragged kitchen girl. For most of her life she has survived by serving those who betrayed her father and took over his lands. Now the time has come for Lessa to shed her disguise—and take back her stolen birthright.

But everything changes when she meets a queen dragon. The bond they share will be deep and last forever. It will protect them when, for the first time in centuries, Lessa’s world is threatened by Thread, an evil substance that falls like rain and destroys everything it touches. Dragons and their Riders once protected the planet from Thread, but there are very few of them left these days. Now brave Lessa must risk her life, and the life of her beloved dragon, to save her beautiful world. . . .

Author(s): Anne McCaffrey
ISBN 13: 9780345335463
Pages: 320
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Interview with the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles Series #1)

The time is now.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks—as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . .

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir—young, romantic, cultivated—to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . .

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire—all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child—and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death—a constant stream of vulnerablestrangers awaiting them below . . .

We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be . . .

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires—the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . .

In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order.
Author(s): Anne Rice
ISBN 13: 9780345337665
Pages: 352
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Hyperion

A pilgrimage to the realm of the Shrike, a part-god/part-killing machine, provides the travellers the forum to tell their incredible stories
Author(s): Dan Simmons
ISBN 13: 9780553283686
Pages: 481
This book is in (3) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter #1)

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry, an orphan, lives with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley.

One day just before his eleventh birthday, an owl tries to deliver a mysterious letter—the first of a sequence of events that end in Harry meeting a giant man named Hagrid. Hagrid explains Harry's history to him: When he was a baby, the Dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, attacked and killed his parents in an attempt to kill Harry; but the only mark on Harry was a mysterious lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

Now he has been invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the headmaster is the great wizard Albus Dumbledore. Harry visits Diagon Alley to get his school supplies, especially his very own wand. To get to school, he takes the Hogwarts Express from platform nine and three-quarters at King's Cross Station. On the train, he meets two fellow students who will become his closest friends: Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.

Harry is assigned to Gryffindor House at Hogwarts, and soon becomes the youngest-ever Seeker on the House Quidditch team. He also studies Potions with Professor Severus Snape, who displays a deep and abiding dislike for Harry, and Defense Against the Dark Arts with nervous Professor Quirrell; he and his friends defeat a mountain troll, help Hagrid raise a dragon, and explore the wonderful, fascinating world of Hogwarts.

But all events lead irrevocably toward a second encounter with Lord Voldemort, who seeks an object of legend known as the Sorcerer's Stone...

Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Author(s): J. K. Rowling
ISBN 13: 9780590353427
Pages: 320
This book is in (4) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Sandman Slim (Sandman Slim Series #1)

Supernatural fantasy has a new antihero

Life sucks and then you die. Or, if you're James Stark, you spend eleven years in Hell as a hitman before finally escaping, only to land back in the hell-on-earth that is Los Angeles.

Now Stark's back, and ready for revenge. And absolution, and maybe even love. But when his first stop saddles him with an abusive talking head, Stark discovers that the road to absolution and revenge is much longer than you'd expect, and both Heaven and Hell have their own ideas for his future.

Resurrection sucks. Saving the world is worse.

Author(s): Richard Kadrey
ISBN 13: 9780061714351
Pages: 416

Title: Dune

Opposing forces struggle for control of the universe when the archenemy of the cosmic emperor is banished to a barren world where savages fight for water
Author(s): Frank Herbert
ISBN 13: 9780441172719
Pages: 535
This book is in (7) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Annihilation

Author(s): Jeff VanderMeer
ISBN 13: 9780374104092

Title: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

From a 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time.
 
Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.

Author(s): Charles Yu
ISBN 13: 9780307739452
Pages: 256

Title: I Am Legend

From out of the night came the living dead with one purpose: destroy Robert Neville, the last man on earth. A mysterious plague has swept the planet leaving in its wake this one survivor. But there is still life of a sort--vampires, the strengthless half-dead who press on Neville from every side. He is almost tempted to join them in I AM LEGEND.

(Publisher's Source)

Author(s): Richard Matheson
ISBN 13: 9780765357151
Pages: 320

Title: Brave New World

Huxley´s vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World -- a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically designed to be passive, consistently useful to the ruling class.
Author(s): Aldous Huxley
ISBN 13: 9780060850524
Pages: 288
This book is in (6) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Graceling

Kristin Cashore’s best-selling, award-winning fantasy Graceling tells the story of the vulnerable yet strong Katsa, a smart, beautiful teenager who lives in a world where selected people are given a Grace, a special talent that can be anything from dancing to swimming. Katsa’s is killing. As the king’s niece, she is forced to use her extreme skills as his thug. Along the way, Katsa must learn to decipher the true nature of her Grace . . . and how to put it to good use. A thrilling, action-packed fantasy adventure (and steamy romance!) that will resonate deeply with adolescents trying to find their way in the world.   Awards: Winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature, winner of the SIBA Book Award/YA, Indies Choice Book Award Honor Book, ALA Best Book for Young Adults, 2008 Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, 2008 School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2008, 2008 Booklist Editors’ Choice, Booklist’s 2008 Top Ten First Novels for Youth, 2009 Amelia Bloomer List, BCCB 2009 Blue Ribbon List   Don’t miss the sequel Fire, also a New York Times bestseller and ALA Best Book for Young Adults, winner of the 2010 Cybil for YA Fantasy/Sci Fi and the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award.

Author(s): Kristin Cashore
ISBN 13: 9780547258300
Pages: 480

Title: Fahrenheit 451

A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners, Guy Montag, suddenly realizes their merit.
Author(s): Ray Bradbury
ISBN 13: 9781451673319
Pages: 159
This book is in (6) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Enders Game

Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives. Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Author(s): Orson Scott Card
ISBN 13: 9780812550702
Pages: 352
This book is in (5) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Captures the strange world of twenty-first-century Earth, a devastated planet in which sophisticated androids, banned from the planet, fight back against their potential destroyers
Author(s): Philip K. Dick
ISBN 13: 9780345404473
Pages: 244
This book is in (4) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series #1)

When St. Louis's most powerful vampire comes to Anita Blake for help, she is faced with her greatest fear-a man capable of arousing in her a hunger strong enough to match his own.

Author(s): Laurell K. Hamilton
ISBN 13: 9780515134490
Pages: 272
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Blood Music

Originally published: New York: Arbor House, 1985.
Author(s): Greg Bear
ISBN 13: 9781497637023
Pages: 282

Title: Assassin's Apprentice (Farseer Series #1)

Young Fitz is the bastard son of the noble Prince Chivalry, raised in the shadow of the royal court by his father's gruff stableman. He is treated like an outcast by all the royalty except the devious King Shrewd, who has him sectetly tutored in the arts of the assassin. For in Fitz's blood runs the magic Skill--and the darker knowledge of a child raised with the stable hounds and rejected by his family. As barbarous raiders ravage the coasts, Fitz is growing to manhood. Soon he will face his first dangerous, soul-shattering mission. And though some regard him as a threat to the throne, he may just be the key to the survival of the kingdom.

Filled with adventure and bloodshed, pageantry and piracy, mystery and menace, Assassin's Apprentice begins the story of a bastard of the royal house, a young man who is trained in the mystic arts of the assassin and who may become the savior of his kingdom.

Author(s): Robin Hobb
ISBN 13: 9780553573398
Pages: 448
This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Among Others


Winner of the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Novel Winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel

Startling, unusual, and yet irresistably readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.

Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead.

Fleeing to her father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England–a place all but devoid of true magic. There, outcast and alone, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off…

Combining elements of autobiography with flights of imagination in the manner of novels like Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, this is potentially a breakout book for an author whose genius has already been hailed by peers like Kelly Link, Sarah Weinman, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

One of School Library Journal’s Best Adult Books 4 Teens titles of 2011 One of io9's best Science Fiction & Fantasy books of the year 2011

Winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Novel

Author(s): Jo Walton
ISBN 13: 9780765331724
Pages: 304

Title: Daughter of The Blood (Black Jewels Series #1)

The Dark Kingdom is preparing itself for the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy—the arrivalof a new Queen, a Witch who will wield more power than even the High Lord of Hell himself. But this new ruler is young, and very susceptible to influence and corruption; whoever controls her controls the Darkness. And now, three sworn enemies begin a ruthless game of politics and intrigue, magic and betrayal...and the destinyof an entire world is at stake....

Compares to national bestselling fantasy authors Ray Feist and Robin Hood
Daughter of the Blood is epic dark fantasy with a romantic edge
Anne Bishop’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies White Swan,Black Raven, and 365 Scary Stories
This is a debut novel
We have two more books in the series coming from Anne Bishop
Stunning cover art by Matthew Innis
Author(s): Anne Bishop
ISBN 13: 9780451456717
Pages: 416

Title: The Curse of Chalion (Chalion Series #1)

"On the eve of the Daughter's Day - the grand celebration that will honor the Lady of Spring, one of the five reigning deities - a man broken in body and spirit makes his way slowly down the road to Valenda. A former courtier and soldier, Cazaril has survived indignity and horrific torture as a slave aboard an enemy galley. Now he seeks nothing more than a menial job in the kitchens of the Dowager Provincara, in the noble household where he served as page in his youth." "But the gods have greater plans for this humbled man. Welcomed warmly, clothed and fed, he is named, to his great surprise, secretary-tutor to the Royesse Iselle - the beautiful, strong-willed sister of the impetuous boy who is destined to be the next ruler of the land. But the assignment must ultimately carry Cazaril to the one place he fears even more than the sea: to the royal court of Cardegoss, rife with intrigues and lethal treacheries." In Cardegoss, the powerful enemies who once placed Cazaril in chains and bound him to a Roknari oar now occupy the most lofty positions in the realm, beneath only the Roya himself. Yet something far more sinister than their scheming hangs like a sword over the royal family: a curse of the blood that taints not only those who would rule, but those who stand in their circle. The life and future of both Iselle and her entire blighted House of Chalion lie in dire peril. The only recourse left to her loyal, damaged servant is the employment of the darkest and most forbidden of magics - a choice that will indelibly mark Cazaril as a tool of the miraculous... and trap him, flesh and soul, in a maze of demonic paradox, damnation, and death for as long as he dares walk the fivefold pathway of the gods.
Author(s): Lois McMaster Bujold
ISBN 13: 9780061134241
Pages: 448

Title: Cloud Atlas

"Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, inveigles his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. And onward, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history." But the story doesn't even end there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

Finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Author(s): David Mitchell
ISBN 13: 9780375507250
Pages: 528
This book is in (3) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Sabriel (Abhorsen Trilogy Series #1)

Since childhood, Sabriel has lived outside the walls of the Old Kingdom, away from the power of Free Magic, and away from the Dead who refuse to stay dead. But now her father, the Mage Abhorson, is missing, and Sabriel must cross into that world to find him. With Mogget, whose feline form hides a powerful, perhaps malevolent spirit, and Touchstone, a young Charter Mage, Sabriel travels deep into the Old Kingdom. There she confronts an evil that threatens much more than her life'and comes face to face with her own hidden destiny. . . Garth Nix's first young adult novel, Sabriel was recently nominated for the Aurealis Award for Excellence in Science Fiction in Australia.

Author(s): Garth Nix
ISBN 13: 9780064471831
Pages: 496

Title: Dhalgren

In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem).

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there…. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man–poet, lover, and adventurer–known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

Author(s): Samuel R. Delany
ISBN 13: 9780375706684
Pages: 801

 


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