11 - 20 - the Top 100 fantasy books of all time

This second series of Eärwa, titled The Aspect Emperor, continues twenty years after The Prince of Nothing series ends. The Three Seas are on the march under the leadership of Anasûrimbor Khellus. Khellus has spent these last twenty years conquering the various nations and forming the largest force he can to assault Golgotterath, the home of the No-god and his Consult, before they can gain full strength and begin their own assault on The Three Seas. A lot has changed in these years. Khellus and Esmenet have become Emperor and Empress and now rule the Three Seas completely since his half-brother Maithanet is the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, the dominant religion of the Tusk.

The Judging Eye (Aspect-Emperor) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: R.Scott Bakker
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 448
Publication date: 2009-01-15
Publisher: Orbit

RRP: £12.99
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The Bonehunters sees us rejoining the Malazan Fourteenth Army, under the command of Adjunct Tavore Paran. Sha’ik is supposedly dead, the army of the Whirlwind in tatters, and the last survivors making for the refuge fortress city of Y’Ghatan under the leadership of Leoman of the Flails.

The Bonehunters: 6 (Malazan Book of the Fallen) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Steven Erikson
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Number of pages: 709
Publication date: 2007-04-02
Publisher: Bantam Books

RRP: £8.99
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Rating a book is inherently dangerous. Well beyond the normal trials of dealing with authors who believe they’re the next Tolkien but are lucky to know how to spell Tolkien, it’s the really good authors that provide the greatest problems. For example, I finished my review for the Bonehunters by Steven Erikson over a week ago. At the time it was a 10 out of 10 book. I still believe it is. However, what happens when the next book is just as good?

Reaper's Gale (Book 7 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Steven Erikson
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Number of pages: 1280
Publication date: 2008-04-07
Publisher: Bantam Books

RRP: £8.99
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So here we are for the eighth time and it just gets better and better. I found this book to be a bit less frenetic than The Bonehunters as it seems like Mr Erikson is getting things organised for the final push. But that is by no means a reason to believe the action slows down. I guess things just seem more in control since we don’t spend any real time with the Malazan army.

Toll the Hounds (Malazan Book of the Fallen) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Steven Erikson
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Number of pages: 1280
Publication date: 2009-05-26
Publisher: Bantam Books

RRP: £6.99
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We’re back with the Malazans marching into the Wastelands to meet up with their allies the Burned Tears and the Perish to head into territory where they believe they will have the final confrontation with the crippled god. But an uneasiness seems to have taken hold of the Malazans as their leader, Adjunct Tavore has grown even more distant and unfocused while crossing the Wastelands. This is added to by the feelings of betrayal from the “sensitives” in the ranks. Definitely a different view of the Malazans to see them so unsure of themsleves.

Dust of Dreams (Book 9 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Steven Erikson
Binding: Hardcover
Number of pages: 509
Publication date: 2009-08-17
Publisher: Bantam Press

RRP: £20.00
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I don’t have much else to say. There are no nits to pick. I salute Landsmann, his compatriots, and their creator. Clearly, this is a writer for the ages, a powerful wordsmith and a uniquely gifted mind at work. Envy him if you must (I do), but by all means read him. I can’t imagine you’ll read a finer book in the fantasy genre. He gives Philip Roth, William Kennedy, and even the venerable Mr. Fitzgerald a run for their money. Black hats off to him.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Michael Chabon
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 464
Publication date: 2008-03-03
Publisher: HarperPerennial

RRP: £7.99
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At the end of Royal Assassin Fitz had taken poison and died. Although we were sure that this was not the end for him, we eagerly anticipated how Robin Hobb might bring him back to life for the final installment of the trilogy. She did not disappoint.

Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy - Book 3) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Robin Hobb
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 848
Publication date: 1998-03-16
Publisher: Voyager

RRP: £8.99
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TH White's The Once and Future King is a serious work, delightful and witty, yet very sombre overall. The volume published as The Once and Future King is actually four works separately composed over about 20 years. The first, The Sword in the Stone, concerns the lost childhood of Arthur, future king of England, and his education by Merlyn. The second, The Queen of Air and Darkness, tells the story of adolescent sons of Orkney and their mother, Morgause. The third, The Ill-Made Knight, takes up the story of Sir Lancelot and his uneasy relation- ship with Queen Guenever and with Arthur. The fourth, The Candle in the Wind, concerns the end of the Round Table and Arthur's death.

The Once and Future King (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: T. H. White
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 832
Publication date: 1996-12-02
Publisher: Voyager

RRP: £9.99
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When I am asked to pick my favourite Terry Pratchett book, The Fifth Elephant is always on my mind as a contender. Granted, it’s a contender insomuch as the Rock would be versus Ali, but it’s still in there! There are books that follow that outshine this book, but only in the way that one star outshines a slightly smaller star.

The Fifth Elephant: A Discworld novel (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Terry Pratchett
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 459
Publication date: 2000-11-02
Publisher: Corgi Books

RRP: £7.99
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Terry Pratchett has a seemingly endless capacity for generating inventively comic novels about the Discworld and its inhabitants but there is in the hearts of most of his admirers a particular place for those novels which feature the hard-bitten captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch Samuel Vimes. Sent as ambassador to the Northern principality of Uberwald where they mine gold, and iron and fat, but never silver, he is caught up in an uneasy truce between dwarfs, werewolves and vampires, in the theft of the Scone of Stone (a particularly important piece of dwarf bread) and in the old werewolf custom of giving humans a short start in the hunt and then cheating...

Pratchett is always at his best when the comedy is mixed with a real sense of jeopardy that even favourite characters might be hurt if there was a good joke in it. As always the most unlikely things crop up as the subjects of gags--Chekhov, grand opera, the Caine Mutiny--and as always there are remorselessly funny gags about the inevitability of story:

"They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere of the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains.

No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical question: when millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is no one to hear it, does it--philosophically speaking--make a noise?

As for the dwarfs, whose legend it is, and who mine a lot deeper than other people, they say that there is a grain of truth in it".

All this, the usual guest appearances and Gaspode the Wonder Dog... -- Roz Kaveney
Amazon.co.uk Review

Memories of Ice is the third book of the series entitled A Tale of the Malazan Book of The Fallen. It follows directly after the events of the first book, Gardens of the Moon, and runs concurrently to the events in the second book, Deadhouse Gates.

Memories of Ice (Book 3 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen) (Amazon.co.uk)

Author: Steven Erikson
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 709
Publication date: 2002-10-01
Publisher: Bantam Books

RRP: £8.99
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The third tale from the Mazalan Book of the Fallen, Memories of Ice is a convoluted military fantasy even more dense than its two predecessors. A deranged and not necessarily human prophet has set a cannibal rabble to conquer a continent, and various armies and wizards are out to stop him--but their reasons for doing this are many, various and often conflicting. The previous two books Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates were full of mysteries, some of them answered here--Erikson's is a world in which gods ascend from humanity to replace gods that fall or are overthrown and in which the world and the supernatural warrants that surround it are full of relics of past gods and past cultures. Young officer Paran tries to make sense of the return of his dead beloved as one of the four souls of a magical child; his commander Whiskeyjack tries to do the right thing as both soldier and human being; the scout Toc tries to survive hideous torture and pass on information he only partly knows. Erikson creates an impressive dark world of brutality and sudden beauty in which dizzying vistas of times past suddenly open; his work repays the concentration needed to follow his complex plotting and sentences. --Roz Kaveney
Amazon.co.uk Review

Book View Cafe is a cooperative site created by a group of writers - including internationally renowned authors Katharine Kerr, Ursula Le Guin and Vonda N. McIntyre - who want to take advantage of the internet's possibilities for reaching a wider audience and to distribute their work directly to their readers. The Book View Cafe is a place where you can find free, original fiction plus the authors' best and out-of-print work for a fee. Fantasy Book Review spoke to Book View Cafe member, science fiction author and memoirist Chris Dolley in February 2010.

Lewis Carroll, the elusive author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, has been the subject of enduring fascination for the past hundred years. The destruction of many major documents about his personal life by his descendants has only magnified the mystery. Jenny Woolf's biography, published to coincide with the release of the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland film, lays waste to the myths and suspicions that have obscured Carroll's reputation by placing him firmly in the context of his own time.