The Wheel of Time runs to roughly 4.4 million words across fourteen books and a prequel. The Lord of the Rings is a little under half a million. A Wizard of Earthsea, which does the same job of building a whole world with its own rules of magic, comes in around 60,000. All three are high fantasy books, and picking the wrong one as your first is the most common way people decide they "don't like fantasy."
So this list isn't ranked by greatness. It's ranked by homework: how many invented names, maps, histories and pages you have to absorb before the book starts paying you back. Every pick is set in a fully invented world (that's what separates high fantasy from urban or portal fantasy), and every pick is good. The question is only which one you can actually finish this month.
Start here if you've never read the genre
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A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
A gifted, arrogant boy named Ged tears a hole in the world showing off, and spends the book being hunted by what came through. Le Guin's magic runs on true names, which makes every spell feel like a moral act rather than a power level.
Reads like a legend told aloud. You'll finish it in two evenings and think about the ending for a week.
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Mistborn: The Final Empire — Brandon Sanderson (2006)
A street thief named Vin joins a crew planning to rob and overthrow an immortal emperor. The magic is fuelled by swallowing metals, and Sanderson explains it so cleanly that the fight scenes play like chess.
The easiest door into modern epic fantasy. Plot-forward, fast, and it ends properly.
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The Priory of the Orange Tree — Samantha Shannon (2019)
A queen whose bloodline supposedly keeps a sleeping dragon god chained, and the secret-order mage sent to guard her. It's a big book, but it's one book, and the romance between Sabran and Ead carries you through the political chapters.
Long but self-contained. For readers who want scale without signing up for a decade.
Once you've caught the bug
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Assassin's Apprentice — Robin Hobb (1995)
A royal bastard called Fitz is raised in the stables and trained as the king's quiet killer. Hobb stays inside his head the whole time, so the kingdom's politics arrive the way they would for a lonely kid: in overheard pieces.
Slow first hundred pages, then it owns you. Keep tissues nearby.
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The Fifth Season — N. K. Jemisin (2015)
A continent that suffers an extinction-level earthquake every few centuries, and the people who can control stone and are enslaved for it. Some chapters are addressed to 'you', which sounds like a gimmick and turns out to be the whole point.
Demanding for about seventy pages. After the reveal you'll want to reread them.
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The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss (2007)
A legendary hero now hiding as an innkeeper tells his own life story over three days. The prose is the draw, and the university chapters are pure comfort reading.
Gorgeous sentences. Know going in that the trilogy has been waiting on its final book since 2011.
The ones people build their reading year around
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The Fellowship of the Ring — J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)
Still the template. The homework here isn't the plot, which is simple; it's the pace, the poems, and the long walk before Moria. Readers who bounce off it usually bounce in the Shire.
If the first chapters drag, skip to Bree. The book really does get going there.
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The Way of Kings — Brandon Sanderson (2010)
A world scoured by hurricane-strength storms, a slave soldier with a death wish, and a scholar with a secret. Wind and Truth (2024) closed the first five-book arc, so you can read a finished story now.
Book one is the slowest. The last 200 pages are why people tattoo glyphs on themselves.
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A Game of Thrones — George R. R. Martin (1996)
Rival noble houses, a winter that's been coming for a while, and a willingness to kill main characters that rewired the genre. Content note: sexual violence and violence against children occur on the page.
Brilliant and brutal. The series has been stalled on book six since 2011, so read it for the ride, not the ending.
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The Eye of the World — Robert Jordan (1990)
Farm kids flee their village when monsters come looking for one of them. It starts in Tolkien's footprints and slowly becomes its own vast thing, with one of the best-built magic systems split by gender.
The biggest commitment on the list. Brandon Sanderson finished it after Jordan's death in 2007, so it does end.
Finished vs. waiting: check before you start
Nothing kills a high fantasy obsession like reaching the last published book and finding out the author hasn't written the next one. Here's where the series on this list stand as of October 2026:
| Series | Status |
|---|---|
| Earthsea, Broken Earth, Farseer (first trilogy), Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings | Complete |
| Mistborn era one, Priory | Complete (Mistborn continues in later eras) |
| Stormlight Archive | First arc of five complete; second arc planned |
| Kingkiller Chronicle, A Song of Ice and Fire | Unfinished, final books unscheduled |
If you want the broader picture across every fantasy subgenre, our list of the best fantasy books overall mixes high fantasy with urban, cozy and grimdark picks. Looking for travel-and-treasure plots specifically? The fantasy adventure list is sorted by what each quest is chasing.
Still can't choose between Mistborn and Earthsea?
Answer a handful of questions about pace, length and how you feel about maps, and the what-should-I-read-next quiz narrows it down. If you've got one favourite already, paste it into the books-like finder instead.
🏰Fantasy serials free on NanoReads
Honest note first: our catalog doesn't have a Tolkien-scale secondary-world epic right now. What it does have is a handful of fantasy serials written by independent authors that you can sample a chapter at a time, which suits readers who want to test a world before committing a month to it. Here's what each one actually is.
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Matte gold diamond
Jeffrey Francis · tagged epic fantasy, heist, war, survivalThe closest thing here to "epic": a boy from a poor family of Indigenous American descent, a suppressed genius at nine, whose uncle reaches the NBA and then turns his back on them. The tags promise kidnapping, a heist and war, so expect a story that grows a lot wider than its opening.
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Mysteries of the Emerald Dragon
Donna Lester · dragons, an ancient Archive, tarotA second book: the Archive starts surfacing hidden rooms and records it buried centuries ago, and a Hierophant card signals the next lesson for Aurelyra, Elias and company. Invented-world history that slowly reveals itself is the most high-fantasy thing in our catalog.
Try the opening chapter → -
Hidden in the Jungle
Edmund Thorne · fantasy adventureA Danish explorer in newly discovered South America trades with some tribes, fights others, and goes after the gold in a temple every tribe calls cursed. It's our world, not an invented one, so call it adventure with a curse rather than high fantasy.
Read the first chapter →
More fantasy, including serialized romantasy, lives on the NanoReads fantasy hub. If you came to the genre through romance, the romantasy glossary entry explains where the line between the two sits.