Esquire 50 Best Fantasy Books
Esquire has announced a 50-title list of the best fantasy books of all time.
For this list, we concentrated on novels that are primarily fantasy, which is why you won’t see genre-straddlers like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time or Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun.
To keep this lineup manageable, we only included books originally published as a bound book on paper — which ruled out classics like Journey to the West and One Thousand and One Nights — and ensured they were currently and easily available in print. We also limited the list to one book per author, to avoid crowding it with multiple titles in the same series.
Their top five titles are:
- The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
- The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner)
- A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (Clarion)
- The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (Gallery)
- Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (Voyager)
For the full list of titles, see the Esquire post.
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