Best Fantasy Books of 2024

Leigh Bardugo's most ambitious and fully realised work to date. Set during the Spanish Inquisition, The Familiar follows Luzia, a kitchen maid who discovers a talent for small miracles — until those miracles attract the wrong kind of attention. Bardugo strips away the YA scaffolding of her earlier work and delivers something genuinely dangerous: a novel about survival, faith, and the cost of being extraordinary in a world that burns what it cannot control. Devastating and essential.

The concluding volume of a series that has grown more confident with each book. Fragment of Darkness brings together the political and personal threads that Lam has been weaving across the trilogy with a climax that earns its emotional weight. The world-building is rich without being exhausting, the characters feel lived-in, and the ending lands. A satisfying conclusion to one of the best underrated epic fantasy series of recent years.

The fifth and final book in the first arc of The Stormlight Archive. Wind and Truth arrives with the weight of four enormous novels behind it and manages, remarkably, to deliver on most of what those books promised. Kaladin's arc concludes in a way that feels genuinely earned. Sanderson writes at his most emotionally direct here, and the final sequence is among the best he has produced. Essential for anyone who has invested in the Cosmere.

A debut that arrived quietly and deserves far more attention. The Daughters of Flood Country is a generational saga rooted in folklore about women in a Louisiana family cursed by water. Bochner writes with the kind of sensory precision that makes you feel the humidity rising off every page. The fantasy elements are woven into the domestic and the personal rather than announced — magic as inheritance, as wound, as survival strategy. One of 2024's most distinctive voices.

Published in 2023 but finding its audience throughout 2024, The God of Endings is one of the most quietly devastating fantasy novels in years. Collette is an immortal woman running a school for gifted children in 1980s New York — a novel about what it costs to love anything when you cannot die. Holland writes with enormous precision and feeling. If you think you are tired of vampire novels, this one will change your mind.

The Expanse authors return with a fantasy-inflected science fiction epic about a conquered alien civilisation and one scientist who might hold the key to humanity's survival or destruction. The Mercy of Gods has the same propulsive quality as The Expanse but with a richer mythological undertow. An enormously confident series opener from two writers who have already proved they can sustain a multi-book epic without losing momentum.

A man inherits his estranged uncle's supervillain empire and must figure out what to do with sentient dolphins, union-organising cats, and an array of genuinely dangerous enemies. Scalzi writes with the kind of effortless wit that makes 300 pages feel like 100. Starter Villain is the ideal palate cleanser after a heavy epic — funny, clever, and unexpectedly warm. A book that does exactly what it promises and does it better than anyone else could.

A gothic YA fantasy set in a crumbling Maine estate with a dark history, a secrets-keeping family, and a protagonist who can hear the dead. McCauley writes atmosphere the way other writers write plot — All the Dead Lie Down is soaked in dread and beauty in equal measure. The best gothic fantasy debut of 2024 and a sign of a writer who will be producing essential work for a long time.