Sometimes, bigger IS better—when it comes to fantasy, at least. The epic fantasies on this list? The biggest. More lore than you can shake a wizard’s staff at. If you’re looking for a true departure from our mundane little reality, you need a fantastical tale that is truly epic in scope. Mountains, dragons, sweeping vistas, battlefield clashes, and more await you in these novels.
Prepare to be swept away by the 10 best epic fantasy books, ranked.
10. Circe by Madeline Miller
If you’ve sufficiently recovered from the emotional trauma induced by reading Madeline Miller’s romantic retelling of the Iliad, Song of Achilles, prepare to have your emotional wounds ripped open again with her reimagined version of The Odyssey. Circe centers around the titular goddess living in the house of Helios, her divine father. Despite living forever in eternal comfort, gods have it pretty rough. Petty jealousies, rivalries, heartbreaks, betrayals—godhood brings out anything but the best intentions in a person. After being exiled from her home for retaliating against her enemies (they had it coming), Circe is sent to an island where she uses her immortal life to study the long-lost art of witchcraft. It’s a tale told over centuries, sweeping in scope, juxtaposed with the intimacy of her affair with Greek sailor Odysseus.
9. The Stand by Stephen King
While Stephen King’s seven-part The Dark Tower series is arguably his most epic fantasy work, his post-apocalyptic fantasy novel The Stand is his best epic told within a single volume. After 99% of the human population is wiped out by a genetically engineered supervirus (thanks, U.S. government), the few immune survivors must learn to live in a post-apocalyptic world. What starts as a sci-fi story quickly turns supernatural as the survivors begin experiencing visions from beyond based on their moral character. The good are called to the doorstep of America’s oldest woman, a kindly soul living alone in the Midwest. The evil are drawn to establish a dark dystopia in Las Vegas, where a supernatural character known as The Man in Black seeks to build an empire off their worst impulses. What follows is an ultimate good vs. evil armageddon battle for the world.
8. The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War is inspired by 20th-century China’s bloodthirsty history. Hailing from a poor village in a remote province of the empire, a young war orphan named Rin turns heads when she aces the entry exam to the most prestigious military academy in all the land. Unlucky for Rin, it’s not the kind of attention she needs, as many of the schools’ aristocratic students are jealous of her success and scheming to knock the upstart back down into the dirt. Thankfully, Rin just discovered that she has latent shamanistic abilities that can help her succeed. She trains to access the magic with a little help from a college student’s best friend: hallucinogenics. Using her powers, Rin fights for her nation as part of a gigantic machine while trying not to get ground up in the gears.
7. The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
The Malazan Book of The Fallen did for literature what Dark Souls did for video games. Like any self-respecting FromSoft game, Steven Erikson’s Fallen series is as epic as it is esoteric. Weaving together thousands of years of history across multiple continents, the dense narrative of these stories isn’t exactly clear from the first read through and must be pieced together in subsequent rereads of the text. While you may only have a dim understanding of the plot the first time you explore this series, you’ll be delightfully distracted by its rich locations, mysterious characters, and spooky vibe. Warning: piecing the whole thing together may require a Charlie Day-style crazy board of connections, but it’ll be worth it.
6. The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter
Evan Winter’s The Rage of Dragons may be set in Bronze Age antiquity, but it’s giving Warhammer 40k vibes. This is a grimdark world of endless war, one the Omehi people have been fighting for 200 years and counting. One in every 2000 Omehi women can summon the power of dragons, and one in every 100 men can transform himself into a beast to tear apart his foes, but the young Tau wasn’t lucky enough to be born one of them. Doomed to the short life of a cog in the war machine, the best Tau can hope for is to get injured (but not too horribly) so he can retire and start a family. That was the plan, until his former comrades betrayed him. To get revenge, Tau decides to defy the odds and become the greatest swordsman of all time, a title granted to one who can stand atop a mountain of corpses. Follow your dreams!
5. The Odyssey by Homer
The O.G. epic fantasy story, The Odyssey, has entertained readers with its seafaring tale for thousands of years. Penned by Homer in Greek antiquity, it’s the story of a sailor named Odysseus who has spent years away from his wife and child fighting in the Trojan War. After the Greeks are victorious, Odysseus hops on his boat for a quick trip home and is blown hundreds of miles off course. To reach the shores of Greece, Odysseus and his gang must confront hungry cyclopses, bewitching sirens, and horrifying sea monsters that await them on their way home. Without The Odyssey and other ancient epics like it, the other entries on this list wouldn’t even exist! Despite being an ancient tale, it still holds up today.
4. Dune by Frank Herbert
Oh boy. Dune. While Frank Herbert’s novel is hailed as one of the most important (if not THE most important) sci-fi tales ever told, at its core, this series is a work of pure “Chosen One”-style fantasy. After his family is sent to rule over a resource-rich desert planet called Arrakis, young Paul Atreides’ life is upended after his father and friends are betrayed by a rival clan jealous of House Atreides’ success. On the run across the desert with only his mother for support, Paul encounters a tribe of desert dwellers who believe he is prophesized to lead their people to glory. While it begins as a classic hero’s journey, as seen in countless human myths, Herbert subverts the narrative by crafting a warning: be careful of who you believe in because they might not be the savior they claim to be.
3. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
Building off the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (and the biggest events in human history), author George R.R. Martin builds the grandest fantasy tale of our time in A Song of Ice and Fire. After a courtly betrayal plunges the realm of Westeros into civil war, the last surviving members of the disintegrating House Stark struggle to stay alive in a kingdom that would rather they were gone. Meanwhile, an exiled young princess from a dethroned dynasty uses her wits to build an army on a continent across the sea, marshaling her powers to reclaim the Iron Throne of Westeros like her forefathers of old (with a little help from the dragons she just hatched).
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
A vintage epic that will go down in history with Gilgamesh and Beowulf, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is one of the most important mythologies ever penned. The story of Frodo Baggins’ quest to rid the world of an evil ring was indelibly branded upon pop culture consciousness with a little help from a movie director named Peter Jackson, and only a person living under a Misty Mountain-sized rock hasn’t heard the tale. While the 12-hour extended editions tell a lot, they don’t tell the whole story—you’ll need to read the books for that. Hobbit genealogies, ancient musical discographies, Tom Bombadil, the Lord of the Rings books go deeper than dwarves into a narrative you thought you knew.
1. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
What fantasy series could possibly be more epic than The Lord of the Rings, you ask? The mammoth 14-book Wheel of Time series. Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy opus is set in a world where human events are dictated by a metaphysical construct known as The Wheel of Time, which causes history to repeat itself in an endless cycle. In the first novel, The Eye of the World, a young farm boy named Rand al’Thor discovers that he is a mythical figure known as the Dragon Reborn, a reincarnated hero fated to battle with a malevolent force known as The Dark One for eternity. While we follow Rand for the beginning of the narrative, the series splinters off into the separate stories of Rand’s friends and foes, who seek to aid or undue the Dragon Reborn’s quest. As the novels continue, the number of characters and factions increase exponentially, leading to an absolute tome of an epic for only the bravest and most wizened collectors of fantasy lore.
Published: Mar 9, 2025 12:52 pm