16 Fantasy Books for Beginners, Ranked by Homework

Viv has spent two decades swinging a sword for money and is finished with it. She sells what she owns, arrives in the city of Thune, and starts turning an old stable into the first coffee shop the place has ever seen, which means explaining to every single customer what coffee is. The obstacles are a leaky roof, a protection racket, a menu that needs a baker, and a romance she does not notice arriving. Almost nothing is at stake, and that is the entire design of the book.

Aziraphale and Crowley have been posted to Earth since the beginning and have quietly become friends, which is against the rules on both sides. When the Antichrist is delivered to the wrong family, the end of the world proceeds on schedule with the wrong boy in position. Around that, Pratchett and Gaiman assemble witches, witchfinders, a book of prophecies that is always accurate and never useful, and the Four Horsemen on motorbikes. The footnotes are half the pleasure and the jokes never stop arriving.

Percy Jackson is failing school, being expelled at regular intervals, and about to discover that his dyslexia and his attention problems are side effects of a brain wired for Ancient Greek. His mother sends him to a summer camp for demigods, Zeus's lightning bolt goes missing, and Percy has ten days to cross America and give it back. Riordan first told a version of this to his own son, and the pacing shows it: short chapters, a joke on every page, monsters at dependable intervals.

You know this plot even if you have never opened the book, which is an odd position for a novel to occupy. What gets lost in all the noise is how efficient the first one is: three hundred pages, one school year, a mystery that actually pays off, and a world explained through a boy who knows nothing, so every explanation is aimed at you as much as at him. It is the smallest book in the series by some distance, and the warmest.

Bilbo Baggins wants breakfast and quiet. What arrives instead is a wizard, thirteen dwarves in his living room, and a contract to burgle a dragon's hoard on the far side of a very large map. The journey runs through trolls, goblins, a riddle game in the dark that is the finest scene Tolkien ever wrote, and an ending about greed that is much less cosy than the opening chapters promise. The narrator is a grandfather telling you a story and interrupting himself to explain what hobbits eat.

Circe is born to the sun god Helios and disappoints everybody: not beautiful enough, not powerful enough, not interesting to her own family. She discovers witchcraft, is exiled to an island for it, and spends centuries there while famous names wash up on her shore. Miller writes gods as gorgeous and shallow, and mortals as the only ones whose choices cost them anything. The prose is the plainest kind of lovely, and the loneliness of the middle stretch is the best thing in the book.

Piranesi lives in a house of infinite halls, with an ocean in the lower floors, clouds in the upper ones and thousands of statues in between. He fishes, charts the tides, maintains his journals, and meets the only other living person twice a week. He is perfectly content. The reader works out, slowly and well before he does, that something is badly wrong with the arrangement. It is short, strange, and written as journal entries that hold some of the loveliest sentences of the last decade.

Ged is a goatherd with too much power and far too little patience. Sent to a school for wizards on an island, he lets pride push him into a spell that tears something loose, and the rest of the novel is a chase across an archipelago where pursuer and pursued keep swapping places. Le Guin's magic runs on true names: learn a thing's real name and you can command it, which makes education and deception the same subject. Under two hundred pages, with no fat anywhere on it.

Kaz Brekker runs a gang in the canal city of Ketterdam and is offered enough money to retire if he can steal a scientist out of an impenetrable fortress. He picks a crew: a sharpshooter, a spy, a soldier, a heartrender and a runaway, each carrying a debt or a wound that explains them. The chapters rotate through their heads, the flashbacks fill in why none of them trusts anybody, and the heist keeps folding into new shapes. Think of it as a fantasy Ocean's Eleven with deeper injuries.

Locke Lamora leads the Gentleman Bastards, thieves who break their city's underworld truce by robbing the nobility through long, patient confidence games. The novel alternates between the current scam and Locke's childhood training under a priest who taught orphans to lie professionally. Camorr is the finest invention here: glass towers nobody understands, sharks in the harbour for public entertainment, and a criminal etiquette stricter than the aristocracy's. It is also far crueller than the opening chapters lead you to expect.

The Lord Ruler has held the world for a thousand years, ash falls from the sky every day, and the working class lives as property. Vin is a distrustful teenage thief until Kelsier, a charming survivor of the empire's worst prison, works out what she is and recruits her into a heist crew with a revolution in mind. The magic runs on metals: swallow one, burn it, get a specific power. Sanderson sets out the rules exactly, then builds fight scenes that obey them to the letter.

Kvothe is running an inn in a quiet village under a borrowed name when a chronicler tracks him down and asks for the true version of events. This book is day one of that telling: a travelling troupe, a childhood ended violently, years starving on city streets, and a university where students pay their fees in cleverness. Rothfuss writes gorgeous sentences and set pieces you will remember for years, and the frame keeps reminding you that the narrator is a man building his own legend as he speaks.

Shiva leads his tribe out of the mountains into Meluha, a spotless empire running on rules, canals and a drink that halts ageing. When the drink turns his throat blue, the Meluhans identify him as the Neelkanth of prophecy, the outsider who will save them from their enemies. Amish takes the myth and runs it as history, so gods behave like generals, engineers and politicians with budgets. The writing is plain and occasionally clumsy, and the central idea is strong enough to carry it anyway.

Rin is a war orphan in a southern province, taken in by a couple who deal opium, and she studies herself sick to pass the empire's entrance exam and escape being married off. The first half is a school story: rivalries, an eccentric teacher, and the discovery that she can call on something old and dangerous. The second half is an invasion drawn from real twentieth-century atrocity, and Kuang refuses to look away from any part of it. Very few novels change register this violently, and she absolutely means the whiplash.

A continent called the Stillness suffers apocalypses on a schedule. Orogenes can quiet the earth with their minds, which makes them necessary and hated, so they are taken young and trained into obedience. The novel runs three threads: a woman whose son has just been murdered, a girl removed from her family, and a trained orogene sent on a coastal mission with a senior she cannot stand. One thread is written in the second person, and by the last chapter you will understand exactly why.

A queen has to produce an heir to keep a sealed dragon asleep. Her secret bodyguard belongs to an order her own church calls heretical. Across the sea, a dragon rider trains for a war her culture remembers in the opposite way, while an exiled alchemist chases a secret that people on both sides would kill for. Shannon runs all four threads across eight hundred pages in a single standalone volume, with dragons in the Western tradition and the Eastern one, and a religious schism sitting at the centre of the plot.