The 10 Greatest Fantasy Books of the Last 15 Years, Ranked
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
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The last 15 years have been a solid era for fantasy. While there have not really been any new franchises with the grandeur of, say, Harry Potter, this decade-and-a-half still gave us an exciting collection of fresh stories, while also seeing established sagas either continue their winning streaks or bring their stories to a graceful close.
The titles below demonstrate just how broad fantasy has become in the last 15 years of literature. Some deliver classic thrills like dragons, detailed magic systems, apocalyptic battles, and casts numbering in the hundreds; others get philosophical or deeply personal or even, at times, totally revisionist.
10 'The Fifth Season' (2015)
"Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?" This gem takes place against a memorable backdrop: the Stillness, an enormous continent periodically devastated by catastrophic geological events. Certain people called orogenes possess the ability to manipulate this seismic energy, making them essential to civilization's survival. However, they are also deeply feared, and the society they protect seeks to control and, at times, even persecute them.
From that setup, the plot follows three protagonists: Essun, whose husband has murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter; Damaya, a young orogene taken away for training; and Syenite, an experienced orogene sent on a mission with the immensely powerful Alabaster. The storylines eventually converge in spectacular fashion. All in all, The Fifth Season is bleak, inventive, and structurally daring, full of colorful worldbuilding and hard-hitting ideas, rightly winning a clutch of fantasy awards on release.
9 'The Priory of the Orange Tree' (2019)
"No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough." The story of The Priory of the Orange Tree is divided between East and West. In Inys, Ead Duryan secretly protects Queen Sabran Berethnet while hiding her allegiance to the Priory. Across the world, Tané has spent her life training for the chance to become a dragon rider. Their cultures have radically different relationships with dragons: revered creatures in the East, treated as evil in the West.
There are some classic genre elements at play here, like ancient evils and, of course, dragons. However, Samantha Shannon spins them into an unusually lavish tale. In over 800 pages, she crams a whole series' worth of story into one standalone volume. Indeed, the book features rival kingdoms, elaborate religions, secret societies, political marriages, court intrigue, and the possible return of a terrifying wyrm. And, beneath all that spectacle, there's some perceptive commentary on the competing histories people construct around the same past.
8 'Rhythm of War' (2020)
"Journey before destination, you bastard." The fourth entry in the sprawling Stormlight Archive sees Brandon Sanderson pushing the series into darker, more introspective territory, even while continuing to expand the enormous conflict consuming Roshar. The war between humans and singers continues, Urithiru comes under occupation, and new discoveries transform the characters' understanding of the powers they've been using all along.
While not flawless, it represented another solid step forward for the series. The book is huge, occasionally overwhelming, and packed with Cosmere revelations, but its finest moments remain deeply human. Protagonist Kaladin, in particular, receives some of his strongest material yet. His struggles with trauma and depression reach a brutal low point, giving Rhythm of War real emotional weight and adding up to a genuine fantasy blockbuster, 1200 pages of magic and battles, sound and fury.
7 'Circe' (2018)
"When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist." In The Odyssey, Circe is one strange danger among many encountered during Odysseus' journey home. With this book, author Madeline Miller places the witch at the center of a tragic yet ultimately inspiring story. Born to the Titan Helios, Circe grows up painfully aware that she possesses neither the beauty nor obvious power prized by her divine family. Her discovery of witchcraft frightens the gods, and she is exiled to the island of Aiaia.
There, famous figures from Greek mythology gradually cross her path: Daedalus, Medea, the Minotaur, Hermes, and eventually Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus. Yet the book's appeal isn't simply spotting familiar characters from ancient stories. Fundamentally, Miller is interested in what immortality might do to a person's sense of time, love, violence, and consequence, and she explores these themes with wit and wisdom.
6 'The Crippled God' (2011)
"We were never what people could be. We were only what we were. Remember us." The Crippled God is the phenomenal conclusion to the Malazan Book of the Fallen, perhaps the most epic of all epic fantasy (it totals more than 11,000 pages across 10 volumes). In it, Tavore Paran and the Bonehunters continue an agonizing march toward a confrontation whose true purpose many of the soldiers barely understand. Elsewhere, storylines involving the Forkrul Assail, K'Chain Che'Malle, Tiste, gods, dragons, and the Crippled God himself begin converging.
Bringing this sprawling web of storylines to a satisfying close represented a Herculean task, yet Steven Erikson pulls it off with style. The resulting climax is enormous, messy, exhausting, funny, and devastating, the perfect payoff for years of buildup. Finally, on the thematic side, The Crippled God subverts the usual grimdark expectations by revealing that the overarching idea of the entire series is actually uncompromising and inexhaustible compassion.
5 'A Dance With Dragons' (2011)
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one." In the fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire saga, Tyrion journeys across Essos after murdering his father, Jon Snow struggles to lead the Night's Watch amid escalating tensions at the Wall, and Daenerys discovers that conquering Meereen was considerably easier than governing it. Around them, characters including Theon Greyjoy, Barristan Selmy, Davos Seaworth, and Asha Greyjoy provide radically different perspectives on a world upended by war.
A Dance with Dragons is compulsively readable, pulling you effortlessly from page to page and chapter to chapter. The branching narrative threads are dense and deliberately unresolved, but GRRM keeps us hooked through his trademark combination of political complexity, atmosphere, psychological depth, and outbursts of shocking violence. Here, no character wears plot armor, making the story a collection of tense scenes, one after the other. Not to mention, there are many cool subplots here that never made it into the show.
Collider Exclusive · Game of Thrones Personality Quiz Which Game of Thrones House Do You Belong To? Stark · Lannister · Targaryen · Baratheon · Tyrell
Five great houses. Five completely different answers to the same question: how do you hold power in a world that will take it from you the moment you stop paying attention? Eight questions will determine where your loyalties — and your nature — truly lie.
🐺Stark
🦁Lannister
🐉Targaryen
🦌Baratheon
🌹Tyrell
01
Someone powerful is acting dishonourably and everyone knows it. What do you do? In Westeros, the answer to this question has ended more than one great house.
02
What is the source of your power? Every house endures because of something. What is it for yours?
03
Who do you truly fight for? Strip away the banners and the words. The honest answer tells you everything.
04
How do you deal with your enemies? A house's method reveals its character as clearly as its words ever could.
05
What kind of ruler do you believe in? Westeros is full of answers to this question. Most of them end badly.
06
You suffer a devastating loss. How does your house respond? How a house handles defeat tells you more about it than how it handles victory.
07
Which of these truths about Westeros do you most believe? Every house has a philosophy. This is yours.
08
The Iron Throne is within reach. What do you do? The answer reveals not just your ambition — but your character.
The Maester Has Spoken Your House Is…
Your answers point to the great house whose words, values, and way of surviving in Westeros match your own. Bend the knee — or don't. That's very much up to you.
🐺 House Stark
Winter is Coming — and you have always known it. You prepare not out of fear but out of duty, because the people who depend on you deserve someone who takes the long view.
- You lead with honour even when it costs you, because you understand that a reputation built on integrity is the only one worth having.
- Your loyalty to family and people runs deep — not as sentiment but as a code that doesn't bend when things get difficult.
- The North endures because Starks endure — not by being the cleverest players in the game, but by being the kind of people others are willing to follow into the cold.
- You are that kind of person. The pack survives. The lone wolf dies. You already know which one you are.
🦁 House Lannister
You understand the game — its rules, its exceptions, and exactly when the rules become the exception. You play it without illusions and without apology.
- You are sharper than most people realise, and you have learned to use that gap to your advantage.
- A Lannister always pays their debts — and you always keep your word, because your word is an instrument of power, and instruments must be kept in working order.
- You love your family with a ferocity that sometimes blinds you, and you know it, and you do it anyway.
- The lion doesn't concern itself with the opinion of sheep. Neither, in the end, do you.
🐉 House Targaryen
You carry a sense of destiny that is difficult to explain and impossible to ignore — the feeling that you are not simply participating in the world but meant to reshape it.
- You are capable of extraordinary things, and you know it, and that knowledge is both your greatest strength and your most dangerous quality.
- Fire and blood are not just words to you — they are a philosophy about what change requires and what it costs.
- The Targaryens at their best were transformative rulers who broke chains and defied the limits of what anyone thought possible.
- At your best, so are you. The dragon has three heads. You are one of them.
🦌 House Baratheon
You are a force — direct, powerful, and difficult to ignore when you enter a room or a conflict. You do not negotiate with challenges. You meet them.
- Ours is the fury — and yours is a kind of intensity that commands attention, respect, and occasionally fear from those who underestimate what's behind it.
- You value strength and straight dealing. You'd rather know where you stand in a fight than navigate a web of courtly whispers.
- The Baratheons built their house on the back of one of the greatest military victories in Westerosi history — and then struggled with what came after.
- The lesson of your house is that winning is not the end of the story. Governing is. You are learning that too.
🌹 House Tyrell
You understand that power does not always announce itself — that sometimes it arrives with flowers, good wine, and a smile that doesn't quite reach the eyes.
- Growing strong is your house's motto, and you live it: patiently, strategically, always investing in the relationships and resources that will matter most when it counts.
- You are charming by choice and calculating by nature — a combination that makes you one of the most effective players in any room you enter.
- The Tyrells fed King's Landing and shaped its politics without ever sitting on the Iron Throne — and they were arguably more powerful for it.
- You know that the person who controls the food controls the kingdom. And you always know where the food is.
4 'Piranesi' (2020)
"The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite." This gorgeous, mysterious story was written by Susanna Clarke, the brains behind Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, one of the very best fantasy books of the 2000s. Piranesi takes place in a magical, otherworldly House, an enormous (perhaps endless) building containing great halls and long corridors. Statues fill its rooms, clouds move through its upper levels, and tides flood its lower floors. As far as Piranesi knows, this extraordinary structure is essentially the entire world.
Piranesi carefully records the House in his journals, cataloguing its statues, mapping its chambers, and tending to the bones of the dead. He knows only one other living person, whom he calls the Other. The relationship initially seems straightforward enough, but inconsistencies begin accumulating. We start sensing that riddles and lies are afoot and follow Piranesi as he slowly untangles them. Charm overflows here, from the likable protagonist himself to the author's lyrical prose.
3 'The Shepherd's Crown' (2015)
"No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away." Published after Terry Pratchett's death, the fifth Tiffany Aching novel became the final Discworld book, bringing an extraordinary 41-novel fantasy sequence to an end. Our heroine is no longer the inexperienced young witch of The Wee Free Men. She has accumulated responsibilities, experience, and a reputation, but those achievements only mean more people now depend upon her.
When a profound loss weakens the boundaries protecting Discworld from the elves, Tiffany must confront both an external threat and internal realizations. She (and the reader) have to reckon with death, inheritance, and what happens when the people who once seemed permanent are suddenly gone. The book is funny as always, and the plot is absorbing, but there's also real emotion here. Indeed, The Shepherd's Crown feels unusually vulnerable for Discworld, in the best way.
2 'The Wise Man's Fear' (2011)
"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man." The Wise Man's Fear is the marvelous second installment in the (frustratingly unfinished) Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy. Protagonist Kvothe's narration continues at the Waystone Inn, recounting the younger years that transformed an extraordinarily talented student into the almost mythical man people believe him to be. This time, the story sends him far beyond the University.
Kvothe enters the service of the Maer Alveron, navigates aristocratic politics, encounters the mysterious Felurian, travels into the Fae, and studies with the Adem, whose culture challenges assumptions he has carried throughout his life. As with the first book, the writing is phenomenal the whole way through, and the characterization is incredibly rich. Kvothe is brilliant, resourceful, and musical but also arrogant, impulsive, financially reckless, and nowhere near as perceptive about other people as he imagines.
1 'La Belle Sauvage' (2017)
"Why are you telling me?" La Belle Sauvage might be the most well-rounded fantasy book of the last 15 years, delivering on all fronts, from the plot and characters to the world-building and themes. Returning to the world of His Dark Materials nearly two decades after The Amber Spyglass could easily have produced a nostalgic retread. Instead, Philip Pullman used the novel to approach his universe from a different angle.
The first volume of The Book of Dust takes place when Lyra Belacqua is still a baby, shifting attention to 11-year-old Malcolm Polstead and the extraordinary chain of events that makes him one of her earliest protectors. He finds himself drawn into a struggle involving the increasingly authoritarian Magisterium, secretive agents, scholars, and people determined to control Lyra's future. The result is a fantasy book with elements of political thriller and myth, jam-packed with biblical allusions and deep philosophical ideas, without ever sacrificing narrative momentum.
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