10 best fantasy books about dragons, ranked
I choose to believe there are more choices available to animal lovers than just “cat person” and “dog person.” Can a dog protect my vast treasure hoard? Can a cat rain fire upon my enemies? No. But some beasts can: dragons. Someday I’ll visit the ASPCA, and there will be a dragon waiting for me. I will take it home and declare myself this world’s ruler. But for now, I’ll just have to get my dragon fix in the pages of a book.
So here they are, the 10 best fantasy books about dragons, ranked. Which dragon is your favorite?
10. Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
One of the most delightfully bizarre books on this list, Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw is a Victorian comedy of manners featuring a cast of characters whose messy, aristocratic lives are further complicated by the fact that they are all cannibalistic dragons. In this world, might makes right, and the most powerful dragons are legally allowed to feed on the smallest to gain power and vigor. At its core, Tooth and Claw is an unexpected parable about privilege and social standing. While its lower-class dragons may not be able to eat the rich, the rich will certainly eat them.
9. Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
Human/dragon relationships have always been tenuous—someone usually ends up getting burned. For the human societies of Seraphina, dragon fire is still very much a thing to fear. In this fantasy kingdom, humans and dragons have brokered a fragile peace, and the shapeshifting fire-breathers take human form to serve as ambassadors and courtiers as well as scientists and mathematicians. After the court’s new bard, Seraphina Dombegh, discovers the charred body of a member of the royal family, tensions between humans and dragons are inflamed once more. If you’re on the hunt for plots and political intrigue, Seraphina can’t be missed.
8. Beowulf
Credit where credit is due: Beowulf is one of the oldest dragon stories ever told, and we don’t even know who wrote it! In fact, it wasn’t written at all but rather memorized and likely sung by bards and storytellers in Viking mead halls since the Dark Ages. And you know what? It still holds up. After killing the nasty man-eater Grendel and his even nastier mother, Viking hero Beowulf has one final foe to fight: a mythical dragon. There are plenty of translations to choose from, including ones by Seamus Heaney and fantasy legend J.R.R Tolkien. If you want a more modern take on the tale, try the deeply philosophical and totally creepy Grendel by John Gardner, told from the perspective of the original epic’s many monsters.
7. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
Dragons are to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series as nukes were to the Cold War. In this brutal fantasy world, power is given to those strong enough to claim it, and the Targaryen dragon riders of old were once the most powerful rulers of all. After a pre-series civil war caused the extinction of dragons, an exiled young scion of the Targaryen dynasty manages hatch a crop of fire-breathers from eggs thought to be long dead. While the sweeping plot of these novels weaves the stories of multiple characters into one royal tapestry, the most interesting thread is that of Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, who seeks to elevate her near-forgotten family name to the heights of its former glory—with lots and lots of fire.
6. When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons is an alternate history book where a generation of 1950s women experienced an unexpected predicament: they all turned into dragons. After thousands of wives and mothers turned into winged reptiles in the Mass Dragoning of 1955, the young Alex Green is left behind to pick up the smoldering pieces that her fiery forebears left in their wake. The subject of the dragons is verboten in post-Dragoning society, but the loved ones of the transformed can’t seem to forget. When Women Were Dragons is an incendiary feminist critique of a gender hierarchy turned on its ear, then made to sprout scales and wings and fly away.
5. His Majesty’s Dragons by Naomi Novik
As if the Napoleonic Wars weren’t devastating enough, Naomi Novik further soils Bonaparte’s bloodstained legacy with His Majesty’s Dragons, where fire-breathing lizards are trained for war. After Captain Will Laurence of the HMS Reliant seizes a dragon egg from a captured French ship, he soon finds himself beginning an unlikely friendship with the newly hatched beast. He’s quickly conscripted into the Aerial Corps, which, if you haven’t guessed already, means he’ll be flying his fire-breathing friend headlong into battle. Unlucky for him, the French forces have dragons of their own. Fantasy-minded history buffs will burn for this book, and lucky for them, it has sequels.
4. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
The first of The Roots of Chaos series, The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, is set in a world ideologically divided on the merits of dragons. In the kingdom of The West, a young queen and her secretly magic lady-in-waiting are scrambling to prevent the return of an ancient and evil dragon known as The Nameless One. Meanwhile, in The East, a young dragon rider trained since birth finds herself traveling across the sea to defend the queen from the Nameless One’s power. It’s a sweeping epic centered around a slow-burn love story between two women that becomes hotter than dragon fire.
3. Eragon by Christopher Paolini
The first of the Inheritance Cycle, Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, is a staple of the genre. When the titular protagonist stumbles across a curiously sized egg in the forest, he does what any high-school-aged boy would do and brings it home with him. Surprise, surprise, the egg doesn’t hatch into some forest ostrich but a bonafide dragon. Eragon has all the classic fantasy novel trappings: ancient swords, geriatric mentors, age-old prophecies, evil kings, and an unbreakable bond between a boy and his flying reptile pet.
2. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
If Beowulf is the great, great, great grandfather of dragon stories, The Hobbit is the fun uncle. Set before the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien’s fanatical tale centers around Bilbo Baggins, a relative of eventual ring-bearer Frodo Baggins, who is called to go on an unexpected journey with a group of dwarves. The dwarves’ ancestral mine has been taken over by the gold-hoarding dragon Smaug, and the gang has to pull off an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist of the serpent’s glittering goods. It’s whimsical, charming, and way better than the movie adaptations—a genre classic for dragon lovers everywhere.
1. The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
The Dragonriders of Pern is what hungry dragons tend to eat: THE GOAT. Half sci-fi, half high fantasy epic, Anne McCaffrey’s series takes the mythos of dragons and gives it a makeover. Far in humanity’s future, explorers have colonized the distant planet of Pern. Rather than living in a technological paradise, the people of Pern have been booted back to the dark ages after a flesh-eating space fungus called Thread nearly destroyed their world. Only a few bits of old technology remain—dragons being one of them.
In this world, dragons weren’t born but genetically engineered to burn away Thread that continues to plague humanity. While many of the books on this list are sweeping and epic in scope, The Dragonriders of Pern increases the scale by orders of magnitude—the whole series takes place over millennia. If you’re looking for an unforgettable space opera that revolves around humans and their inseparable bond with the dragons they ride, The Dragonriders of Pern is everything you want and more.
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