1 - 10 - the Top 100 fantasy books of all time

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece. The Lord of the Rings is the best known as most enjoyed fantasy book of all time. If you have never read this, or The Hobbit before, then you are in for a real treat!

The Lord of the Rings (3 Book Box set) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 1500
Publication date: 1999-03-01
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

RRP: £20.00
Lowest new price: £11.36
Lowest used price: £8.00

For those who have not read Tolkien's epic fantasy, or for those looking to replace a worn and battered copy, this three-volume The Lord of the Rings box set is a great place to start. Comprising the three novels that make up the Lord of the Rings sequence--The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King--the whole set is presented in matching matt black packaging with embossed runes and coloured rings. Of course, beneath the fancy covers lies a great epic story of good versus evil, perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told. Attractively presented--and at a great price--there really is no excuse not to have this in your collection. So go on, give it a try; once you've entered Tolkien's fantastic imagination, you'll find it hard to leave. --Jonathan Weir
Amazon.co.uk Review

The Earthsea Quartet brings together Ursula Le Guin’s four legendary Earthsea sagas for the first time in a single volume.

The Earthsea Quartet: "A Wizard Of Earthsea"; "The Tombs of Atuan"; "The Farthest Shore"; "Tehanu" (Puffin Books) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Ursula Le Guin
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 704
Publication date: 1993-06-24
Publisher: Puffin

RRP: £10.99
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Guy Gavriel Kay's tale of a curse that wipes a country's name from memory. Only those born before the curse can remember Tigana as it was. The sorcerers of the two invading armies are integral to the plot and the themes of love and revenge run strong.

Tigana (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 688
Publication date: 1999-12-31
Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc

RRP: £12.99
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The year is 1806 and the country is England. The Napoleonic wars are raging in France and magic, an academic subject only, is no longer practised. A street peddler foretells of a prophesy of the return of magic to England, which has been dead since the disappearance of the Raven King some three hundred years ago.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Susanna Clarke
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 1024
Publication date: 2005-09-05
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

RRP: £9.99
Lowest new price: £3.49
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Any book touted as the 'adult Harry Potter' runs the risk of attracting critical parries from swords of the double-edged variety. If this wasn't enough, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell--the debut novel from Susanna Clarke--also invites comparisons with Jane Austen. Set in the early nineteenth-century, the action moves from genteel drawing rooms-albeit where a mischievous Faerie king sips tea with the wife of a very human government minister, to the bloody battleground of Waterloo, where giant hands of earth drag men to their doom. The juxtaposition of perfectly realised magical worlds and the everyday one with which JK Rowling and Philip Pullman so successfully captured our imaginations and the social comedy of Austen and Thackeray can easily be recognised. But less easy to pastiche is the ability of these writers to induce sheer narrative pleasure, and it is Clarke's great achievement that she succeeds with this hugely enjoyable read. Gilbert Norrell is determined to single-handedly rehabilitate his sanitised and patriotic version of English magic, which has suffered a post-Enlightenment neglect after a richly dark history. He ruthlessly secures his place as England's only magician in two marvellously drawn feats. First, he brings the statutes of York Cathedral to life and then, to facilitate his entry into London society, he brings a young bride-to-be back from the dead--a feat with terrible consequences. However, another more naturally gifted magician-Jonathan Strange-emerges to become his pupil and later his rival. Strange becomes increasingly obsessed with the Raven King-the medieval lord-magician of the North of England and pursues his desire to recruit a fairy servant to the edge of madness. Whilst the differing characters of Norrell and Strange give the book a central human conflict, it is the tension between the dual natures of civilised and wilder magic that lends it a metaphysical texture that shades the narrative with wonderful and troubling descriptions of ships made of rain, paths between mirrors and faerie roads leading out of England to a bleak yet dazzling realm. Fortunately, the precision of her storytelling never reigns in Clarke's prodigious imagination. Clarke's broad canvas of characters-including Wellington, Napoleon and Bryon, locations and tones are masterfully realised. However, sometimes her own enchantment with them leads her to drop her pace, although even at almost 800 pages, this is a book to which you'll muster up little resistance. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the perfect novel to take up residence in as the nights get longer. -- Fiona Buckland -- This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.co.uk

The Liveship Traders series continues with the second book, The Mad Ship. Althea Vestrit continues her quest to reclaim her rightful inheritance, the liveship Vivacia. The Vivacia has been seized by pirates led by the enigmatic Kennit, a man who believes that destiny leads him to become King of the Pirate Isles. The Vestrit family are nearing financial ruin which leads them closer to the mysterious Rain Wild Traders who own the ship. Amidst these events the mad ship, Paragon is once again launched despite the history of death and despair that surrounds him.

The Mad Ship (Liveship Traders) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Robin Hobb
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Number of pages: 901
Publication date: 2000-03-06
Publisher: Voyager

RRP: £8.99
Lowest new price: £3.60
Lowest used price: £0.88

High heroic fantasy has rarely paid enough attention to ships and sailors, the lifeblood, after all, of trade and survival in a non-technological world. In her Liveship Traders series, Robin Hobb more than makes up for this with a sequence in which economic survival is the principal objective of the merchant family, the Vestrits, who provide most of her viewpoint characters. The Mad Ship takes up their adventures where Ship of Magic left off, with young would-be priest Wintrow the captive of the pirate Kennit and bonded to the living figurehead of the family ship Vivacia; and his sister Malta caught up in the affairs of the changeling traders of the Rain Wild. Their aunt Althea, who feels she should have had command of Vivacia, is off having adventures as a sailor, and the mysterious Amber is trying to heal and repair the shattered mad hulk Paragon, who killed his crew and lies abandoned in the sand dunes. All this and war and conspiracy too--Hobb gives us a rich portrait of a world and a family in turmoil and raises some interesting questions about what it is to be used and make use of. --Roz Kaveney
Amazon.co.uk Review

The events in Storm of Swords overlap the ending of the second book, A Clash of Kings. I have to admit to not enjoying Clash of Kings overly, something I discovered placed me in a minority. Looking back I feel that I was a bit lazy when reading it, characters are thrown at you at a not inconsiderable rate of knots and you can either use the handy cast of characters at the beginning of the book to refresh your memory when you get lost or you can do what I did… carry on regardless hoping that everything will become clear in time.

A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3 Part 1) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: George R.R. Martin
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 688
Publication date: 2001-06
Publisher: Voyager

RRP: £8.99
Lowest new price: £3.59
Lowest used price: £1.74

The third volume of his six-volume fantasy epic "A Song of Ice and Fire", "A Storm of Swords" continues Martin's vigorous account of the civil wars which follow the death of King Robert--the usurper who deposed a dynasty gone mad and dangerous--and the judicial murder by his widow and heir of Ned Stark, the man who made him king. The surviving Stark children are scattered--Robb leading a revolt in the North; Arya learning hard lessons as she treks through the war zone; Sansa an observer of court intrigue; crippled Bran heading towards a sorcerous destiny; and Jon engaged in desperate defence of the ice-wall against barbarians and worse things. Daenerys, pretender and ruler of dragons, is building an empire elsewhere. Meanwhile, characters we have thought of as villains, notably Jaime Kingslayer, are developing belated consciences. Martin keeps on upping the ante of violence and betrayal in this compelling saga of a fantasy middle ages soiled with blood and mud; his economic use of magic and his fascination with complex characters make this the sword-and-sorcery series for people with adult taste. As the series proceeds, his writing gets ever leaner and sharper, the evocation of the magical ever more sinister. --Ros Kaveney
Amazon.co.uk Review

In what can really only be called a tour de force by an author who is arguably the greatest living English novelist, Terry Pratchett has pulled out all the stops for his latest book, Nation. Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series of books, which stretch across a monstrous 36 books (of which the majority does well to score below 7 out of 10). However this time around, Pratchett has stepped off the Disc and into a parallel universe to our own, with honorable mentions to Einstein and Isaac Newton.

Nation (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Terry Pratchett
Binding: Hardcover
Number of pages: 300
Publication date: 2008-09-11
Publisher: Doubleday Children's Books

RRP: £16.99
Lowest new price: £4.75
Lowest used price: £1.54

After decades of internecine warfare, the tribes of the Tiste Edur have at last united under the Warlock King. There is peace – but it has been exacted at a terrible price: a pact made with a hidden power whose motives are at best suspect, at worst deadly.

Midnight Tides (Book 5 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Steven Erikson
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 960
Publication date: 2005-03-01
Publisher: Bantam Books

RRP: £8.99
Lowest new price: £3.99
Lowest used price: £2.62

Midnight Tides is the fifth book in Steven Erikson's immense fantasy sequence The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which began in 1999 with the much-praised Gardens of the Moon. In successive volumes the action moves around the world of the Malazan Empire, linked by a back-story as ancient and complex as Tolkien's. Here a prologue in "The Time of the Elder Gods" shows clashes and betrayals of gods, dragon shape shifters, demons, ice mages and more. In modern times, some very old characters survive under other names, and history has been seriously misremembered...

Now there's an impending clash between the recently-united barbaric tribes of the Tiste Edur and the adjoining Kingdom of Lether, whose capitalistic decadence would make it quite sympathetic if not for policies of ruthless expansionism and slavery.

We come to know people on both sides: the Tiste Edur are driven by fierce honour and have strange, fascinating customs (Erikson is an anthropologist). But their Warlock King has, so to speak, switched gods in midstream and allied with a distinctly dark power while seeking a potent "gift" from another unreliable deity. Ironically, despite the provocation of Letheran seal-poachers on his coast, the Warlock King wants a safe, unassailable peace. His supernatural allies have other plans, and the tribes find themselves following a fearsome but also pitiable new Emperor into war.

Oddly enough, an old, ambiguous Letheran prophecy about an emperor is about to fall due. Meanwhile this kingdom has internal enemies, including a master financier plotting ruin while living in abject poverty with his resourceful manservant: this double act provides a vein of Jeeves-and-Wooster comic relief. There are complex manoeuvres in court circles. The undead walk--but that's normal in Lether. Restless stirring is felt in the ancient Hold where dark magic has long been confined. Then comes the clash with the Tiste Edur, and sorcerers' weapons of mass destruction are unleashed on both sides.

It's a big, complex, satisfying blockbuster, crammed with horrors, humour, spectacular effects and devious twists. Loose ends will presumably be picked up in later volumes. --David Langford
Amazon.co.uk Review

Far from fading with time, Kenneth Grahame’s classic tale of fantasy has attracted a growing audience in each generation. Rat, Mole, Badger, and the preposterous Mr. Toad (with his ‘Poop-poop-poop’ road-hogging new motor-car), have brought delight to many through the years with their odd adventures on and by the river, and the imposing residence of Toad Hall.

The Wind in the Willows (Wordsworth Children's Classics) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Kenneth Grahame
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 192
Publication date: 1993-11-01
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd

RRP: £1.99
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A gripping story of rebellion in a rabbit warren and the subsequent adventures of the rebels... Adams has a poetic eye and a gift for storytelling which will speak to readers of all ages for many years to come.

Watership Down (Puffin Books) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Richard Adams
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 480
Publication date: 2000-08-31
Publisher: Puffin

RRP: £6.99
Lowest new price: £2.10
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Despite the fact that it's often a hard sell at first (what teenager wouldn't cringe at the thought of 400-plus pages of talking rabbits?), Richard Adams' bunny-centric epic rarely fails to win the love and respect of anyone who reads it, regardless of age. Like most great novels, Watership Down is a rich story that can be read (and reread) on many different levels. The book is often praised as an allegory, with its analogues between human and rabbit culture (a fact sometimes used to goad skeptical teens, who resent the challenge that they won't "get" it, into reading it), but it's equally praiseworthy as just a corking good adventure.

The story follows a warren of Berkshire rabbits fleeing the destruction of their home by a land developer. As they search for a safe haven, skirting danger at every turn, we become acquainted with the band and its compelling culture and mythos. Adams has crafted a touching, involving world in the dirt and scrub of the English countryside, complete with its own folk history and language (the book comes with a "lapine" glossary, a guide to rabbitese). As much about freedom, ethics and human nature as it is about a bunch of bunnies looking for a warm hidey-hole and some mates, Watership Down will continue to make the transition from classroom desk to bedside table for many generations to come. --Paul Hughes
Amazon.co.uk Review

With the beginning of a new year come resolutions, gym memberships, budgets and more. But, honestly, none of that really matters in the face of some of the books that are coming this year. So here’s a small taste of what is coming in 2010 from some of fantasy’s best, and why I’m looking forward to them.