Books Like Brandon Sanderson

If you haven't read everything in the Cosmere, start here — a standalone Sanderson set in an alternate America where chalk drawings come to life as magical defenders. The Rithmatist showcases everything that makes Sanderson essential: a magic system so well-defined it feels like a board game, a protagonist driven by curiosity, and a mystery that unfolds with perfect pacing. The ideal Sanderson gateway for readers who want to understand why the magic feels different.

The crown jewel of the Cosmere and one of the most ambitious fantasy projects ever attempted. Five books planned, each doorstop-sized, each packed with flashback chapters, in-world mythology, and a magic system that evolves as you understand it better. Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar are three of the most fully realised characters in modern fantasy. If you've read Mistborn and want more, this is where Sanderson reaches his ceiling.

Maia is the half-goblin, half-elf fourth son of the emperor — which means he's the last person anyone expected to inherit the throne when an airship crash kills his father and brothers. A fantasy novel where the protagonist is genuinely good, where the challenge is navigating a hostile court with kindness rather than cunning. Sanderson fans who love the sense of a protagonist learning a system and mastering it will find the same satisfaction in Maia learning to be emperor.

Three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy is the most formally inventive fantasy of the last decade — told partly in second person, set on a supercontinent that ends the world on a geological schedule, with an orogeny magic system as hard and precise as anything in Sanderson. The magic has rules, costs, and a history that gradually reveals itself. Completely different in tone from Sanderson — darker, angrier, more personal — but equally rigorous.

Rowe is essentially Sanderson for readers who want even more system. Sufficiently Advanced Magic is set in a tower where each floor tests a different kind of magic, and the protagonist Corin is a theorist obsessed with understanding how attunements work. The magic is so precisely defined it approaches game mechanics. If what you love about Sanderson is the feeling that you could diagram the magic on a whiteboard, Rowe gives you that feeling turned up to eleven.

A standalone set in the First Law world, covering three days of a single battle. Abercrombie is the anti-Sanderson in many ways — messier, darker, less interested in satisfying payoffs — but The Heroes shares Sanderson's quality of making you feel like the author is fully in command of a complex system, in this case a battle with dozens of moving pieces. For Sanderson fans who want to venture somewhere darker without losing the sense of authorial control.

McClellan was Sanderson's student at BYU and it shows — Promise of Blood has Sanderson's DNA all over it, including a powder-mage system that is immediately comprehensible and satisfying. A general overthrows a corrupt monarchy on the same day that the gods begin returning to the world. Slicker and faster than Sanderson with a similar emphasis on magic-as-system. The ideal bridge book for Sanderson fans wanting something new.

If Sanderson's characters are aspirational — people striving to be better, to keep their oaths, to stand for something — Abercrombie's are cautionary. The Blade Itself is what happens when you take the same epic fantasy ingredients Sanderson uses and ask: what if the hero is a monster? What if the mentor is worse? Essential for any Sanderson fan who wants to understand the full range of what modern fantasy can do.