Books Like Patrick Rothfuss

Lynch shares Rothfuss's gift for a charismatic protagonist narrating his own clever schemes, and Locke Lamora is as entertaining a fantasy hero as Kvothe. The Gentlemen Bastards series is set in a fantasy Venice and follows a crew of con artists running increasingly dangerous long games. The prose is sharp and funny, the world-building rewards attention, and Lynch's commitment to letting things go catastrophically wrong gives the series genuine stakes.

The obvious complement to Rothfuss for readers who want epic scale and world-building depth. Sanderson doesn't write with Rothfuss's lyrical quality but he constructs his world with the same obsessive care, and the Stormlight Archive's mythology and magic system are as intricate as anything in the Kingkiller Chronicle. For readers who want the depth without the wait — Sanderson finishes his series.

If somehow you haven't read the book that spawned this list, start here. Kvothe narrates his own legend to a Chronicler at an inn — three days of talking, covering his childhood poverty, his time at the University, his love for Denna, and the events that made him the most famous man alive. The prose is extraordinary. The frame narrative is brilliant. The University sequences are some of the best magic school writing in fantasy.

Kay writes fantasy with a literary quality that matches Rothfuss's prose ambition. Tigana is about a conquered country whose name has been magically erased — only those born there can hear it — and the resistance movement trying to restore it. Kay's emotional intelligence and his willingness to slow down and let scenes breathe gives his best work the same reading experience as Rothfuss at his best.

Le Guin's Earthsea cycle is the original lyrical fantasy — the prose is spare rather than florid but every sentence carries weight, and Ged's story of pride, mistake, and atonement has the same sense of legend-in-the-making that Kvothe's story has. Le Guin invented many of the conventions Rothfuss both uses and subverts, and reading Earthsea explains why the Kingkiller Chronicle feels like a response to something deeper in fantasy tradition.

Where Rothfuss writes a protagonist who is aware of his own legend, Abercrombie writes a world that is brutally aware of fantasy conventions and refuses to honor them. The First Law trilogy is the anti-Rothfuss in many ways — darker, more cynical, less interested in beauty — but it shares the quality of making you feel you're in the hands of an author who knows exactly what they're doing with the genre.

Clarke's debut is one of the most beautifully written fantasy novels of the 21st century — an alternate history of England where magic returns, told with the dry precision of a Victorian novel and footnotes that build an entire mythology of faerie England. For readers who want their fantasy with genuine literary ambition and prose that rewards slow reading.

If you've exhausted the Kingkiller Chronicle and want something with comparable scope and world-building depth, the Stormlight Archive is the best available option. The mythology of Roshar is as intricate as the Four Corners, the magic system has the same quality of being learnable rather than arbitrary, and Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar are three of modern fantasy's great characters.