14 Best Book Series to Read (And Where Each One Sags)

You already know the plot. What is worth saying is how the thing is built: seven books, one school year each, and a tone that ages alongside the reader, so book one is a children's adventure about a magic castle and book six is about a teenager being handed a job that will probably kill him. The early volumes are short and warm. Rowling's habit of hiding the answer in plain sight in chapter two runs through every book, which is why rereading them is a different sport from reading them the first time.

Panem keeps its districts obedient by making their children fight to the death on television, and Katniss Everdeen takes her younger sister's place in the arena. Collins writes in first person present tense, which sounds like a trick and works like an engine, since you learn every fact at the same moment she does. Book one is the tightest thriller on this list, and book two, Catching Fire, is better than book one, which almost never happens in a trilogy. The politics underneath it all are considerably sharper than the films let on.

Earth, Mars and the mining stations of the asteroid belt are one bad week away from war. A ship's officer named Holden finds a derelict and broadcasts what he sees to everybody, while a detective named Miller goes looking for a rich family's runaway daughter. The threads meet, and nine books follow what happens when people find something older and smarter than they are. Corey writes competent adults doing difficult jobs under pressure, which is far more satisfying than it sounds, and every volume ends where a volume should end.

Elena and Lila meet as children in a violent Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s, and four novels follow them for the next sixty years. One escapes through education, the other stays and burns brighter anyway, and the narrator spends her entire life measuring herself against her friend. Ferrante writes envy the way other novelists write love, which is to say honestly and without flattering anybody involved. The cast list at the front of each book looks alarming and you stop needing it around page eighty. Ann Goldstein's English is plain, quick and never in the way.

Lyra grows up running loose in an Oxford that is not ours, a place where every person's soul walks beside them as an animal called a daemon. Children are vanishing, she goes north after them, and what she uncovers turns a children's adventure into an argument with organised religion. Pullman writes armoured bears and airship crossings with total conviction, and this first book comes close to perfect. The trilogy grows stranger and angrier as it goes. American editions call it The Golden Compass, which is the same novel with a worse title.

Blomkvist has just lost a libel case and most of his reputation when an ageing industrialist hires him to find out what happened to a niece who vanished from a locked island in the sixties. Salander is the researcher who was paid to investigate Blomkvist before he was hired: a hacker with a photographic memory, a court-appointed guardian, and no interest in explaining herself to anybody. The two threads run apart for a long time and the book only catches fire when they meet. Larsson writes paperwork and corporate fraud with a reporter's patience.

Henry the Eighth wants a new wife and a new church, and the man who arranges both is a lawyer with no family name, no gentleman's education, and a memory like a filing cabinet. Mantel writes Cromwell in close present tense, so you sit behind his eyes while he counts every debt and weakness in the room. The famous difficulty is the pronoun: for long stretches, he means Cromwell even when another man has just spoken. Give it fifty pages and your ear adjusts, and then it becomes the most alive historical fiction I have read.

Uhtred is born in Northumbria, orphaned in a raid, and brought up by the Danes who killed his father, which leaves him permanently on the wrong side of everybody he meets. Cornwell then walks him through the making of England: Alfred, the wars, the shield walls, the treaties broken within a chapter of being sworn. The pleasure is consistency. Every book has a battle, a betrayal and a plan, Uhtred narrates in the dry voice of an old man looking back, and the history underneath is solid enough that you finish knowing how a kingdom got built.

Discworld is a flat world carried by four elephants standing on a turtle, and the joke that keeps working is that it runs exactly like ours. Mort is a gangly teenager nobody wants as a farmhand, so he ends up apprenticed to Death, who speaks in capital letters and decides mid-book to find out what fun is. Left in charge of the rounds, Mort saves a princess who was supposed to die, and history starts folding in on itself. Pratchett is funny on the surface and quietly furious underneath, mostly about power and who gets stood on.

Cormoran Strike is sleeping in his office, owes money he cannot pay, and has one temp he cannot afford when a lawyer walks in convinced that his sister did not jump. Robin is that temp, and she turns out to be the best investigator in the room. Galbraith is a pen name of J. K. Rowling, which is either irrelevant or the whole conversation depending on who you ask. The books themselves are old-fashioned detective novels: long, procedural, London-shaped, with a will-they thread running underneath the cases and each volume solving its own crime.

Percy Jackson gets thrown out of yet another school, learns that the monsters bothering him are real, and lands at a summer camp for the children of Greek gods. Zeus's lightning bolt has gone missing, Percy is blamed for it, and he crosses America with a satyr and a daughter of Athena to sort it out. Riordan puts jokes on every page and titles his chapters like a class clown. He built the story for a son with dyslexia and ADHD, which is why the hero's difficulties read as equipment rather than damage.

Ashwin Chopra is a decent policeman being pushed out over a heart condition, and on the same morning a letter arrives leaving him an elephant. He opens a small agency, keeps the elephant in the compound, and works the death of a boy that his old station has already filed as an accident. Khan writes Mumbai as a working city rather than a postcard: the traffic, the resettlement colonies, the deference money buys inside a police station. The tone stays warm, the crimes do not, and the two sit together better than they have any right to.

The premise is the best thing here: what if Shiva was a real man, a tribal leader from near Mansarovar, whose deeds were retold so often that they hardened into scripture? He walks into the Meluhan empire, drinks something that turns his throat blue, and is greeted as the saviour of a prophecy he has never heard of. The books argue about good and evil the way an engineer would, laying out systems rather than mysteries. The prose is functional and sometimes clumsy, the debates run long, and the idea carries you regardless.

A king rides north to make an old friend his chief adviser, and that one favour starts a civil war that eats a continent. Martin tells it from inside a rotating set of heads, including people you were trained to hate in chapter one, so the moral arithmetic keeps shifting under you. The first three books are one of the great runs in modern fantasy. Then the cast triples in size, two volumes split the characters between them, and the pace turns glacial. The most recent novel appeared in 2011.