There exists, dear reader, a peculiar sort of enchantment in our world today—one where magic hides in city alleyways, where dragons bond with university students, and where vampires navigate the centuries with all the complexity of any mortal heart. This is contemporary fantasy, and never has it flourished more brilliantly than now.
Whether you seek mysteries wrapped in the strange, romances touched by the impossible, or adventures that make the everyday extraordinary, permit us to guide you through the very finest tales our age has to offer.
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
Imagine, if you will, a world where trees burst quite unexpectedly from human bodies, where detectives wear blindfolds yet see more clearly than any, and where leviathans threaten the very foundations of empire. Such is the delicious peculiarity of this Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award winner.
Our narrator, Dinios Kol, serves as assistant to the magnificently eccentric Ana Dolabra—a detective whose mind leaps from deduction to deduction with the same fearsome grace as a cat pursuing particularly clever mice. When imperial officers begin dying in the most botanical of fashions, these two must untangle a mystery that threatens everything.
Bennett has crafted something altogether rare: a fantasy mystery that honors both genres with equal devotion. The clues are fairly presented, the magic is wondrous, and the resolution satisfies like the final piece of a most complicated puzzle.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
Across five hundred years, three women discover what it truly means to hunger—and what becomes of those who have been consumed their entire lives by forces they never chose. María in 1532 Spain, Charlotte in Regency London, and Alice in modern Boston each carry fangs and fury in equal measure.
This sapphic vampire epic earned its place as a Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Best Fantasy and claimed the top spot on every bestseller list worth mentioning. Schwab writes of women full of want and contradiction, rage and yearning for freedom.
Some have called it the finest vampire novel since Interview with the Vampire, and having wandered through its pages, one finds it difficult to argue. This is gothic literature at its most intoxicating.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
Now here is a romance quite unlike any other—for what happens when a shapeshifting monster cobbled together from borrowed bones and bear traps falls utterly, hopelessly in love with the very human hunting her?
Shesheshen, our delightfully monstrous protagonist, constructs bodies from the remnants of past encounters. When she’s rescued by the warm-hearted Homily, she faces a predicament: Homily believes Shesheshen to be human, and also happens to be searching for the very sort of creature Shesheshen actually is.
This Nebula Award winner for Best Novel explores disability, trauma, and the possibility of finding love that accommodates rather than demands change. Wiswell has given us something precious—a romance that views tenderness through entirely fresh eyes.
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
Two graduate students. One deceased professor. A literal descent into Hell.
From the author of Babel and Yellowface comes a dark academia fantasy that mingles institutional satire with Dante-style underworld exploration. Alice Law has sacrificed everything—health, sanity, romantic prospects—for Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge. When he perishes in an accident possibly of her making, she discovers he’s ended up somewhere rather worse than the grave.
Kuang, herself a PhD student, poured genuine academic suffering into these pages. The magic system operates on logic paradoxes requiring years of fruitless research—rather like actual academia, one suspects. Her characters love and loathe their advisor with the specific flavor only those who’ve survived thesis committees can truly appreciate.
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
When enchantresses come calling at country estates, wise folk bar their doors. This Locus Award winner reimagines the Brothers Grimm tale of “The Goose Girl” through lenses both darkly Gothic and delightfully comedic.
Young Cordelia lives without privacy, for her mother Evangeline compels absolute obedience through terrible magic. When Evangeline sets her sights upon remarriage to a kind-hearted squire, only his spirited sister Hester suspects the doom that has come visiting.
Kingfisher blends Regency sensibilities with fairy tale menace, creating something Publishers Weekly called “deeply compassionate, thrilling, and often laugh-out-loud.” One finds oneself cheering for middle-aged women with bad knees who nonetheless refuse to let evil triumph.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The House is infinite. Its halls stretch beyond counting, its statues number in thousands, and somewhere within its corridors, an ocean rages. Our narrator knows only that he is called Piranesi, that he tends the dead, charts the tides, and meets occasionally with the Other.
This Women’s Prize for Fiction winner defies simple description. Part mystery, part meditation on memory and identity, wholly unlike anything else upon your shelves. David Mitchell called it “an exquisite puzzle-box far bigger on the inside than the outside.”
Clarke waited sixteen years between novels, and she returned with something that feels less written than discovered—as though these strange halls always existed, waiting for someone to map them. Readers seeking the uncanny, the beautiful, and the genuinely surprising need look no further.
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
What happens when a battle-weary orc barbarian hangs up her sword and opens a coffee shop in a city that has never tasted coffee? Pure, unalloyed coziness happens, dear reader.
Viv wants nothing more than to leave violence behind and build something peaceful. But old rivals threaten, construction proves troublesome, and absolutely no one understands what a “latte” is supposed to be. This story gave birth to an entire subgenre—cozy fantasy—and remains its brightest standard-bearer.
T. Kingfisher described it as “a warm hug of a book, a place to retreat from the world for a little while.” When the world grows heavy, when dragons and dark lords feel exhausting rather than exciting, this tale of found family and second chances offers precisely the respite needed.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
Dragons. Assassins. Mages. Pirates. Queens. And at the heart of it all, a feminist retelling of Saint George and the Dragon that reimagines who gets to be the hero and who gets to be saved.
This million-copy bestseller weaves together East and West, dragonriders and dragon-slayers, in an epic that feels both classic and revolutionary. Queen Sabran the Ninth must produce an heir while threats multiply; Ead Duryan serves as handmaiden while secretly protecting her queen through forbidden magic; and across the sea, Tané has trained her entire life to bond with the water dragons revered as gods.
Shannon created a world where love takes many forms, where women hold power, and where the greatest battles are fought for connection rather than conquest.
The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
Three consecutive Hugo Awards. The first author ever to achieve such a feat. And the books themselves? Nothing less than a fundamental reimagining of what fantasy can accomplish.
Beginning with The Fifth Season, Jemisin introduces a world plagued by regular apocalypses—”Fifth Seasons” of catastrophic climate change. Those who can control seismic energy, called orogenes, are feared, enslaved, and destroyed by the very society they protect.
NPR declared that Jemisin “brilliantly illustrates the belief that imaginative world-building is vital—but also that every character is a world unto herself.” The second-person narration may challenge at first, but persist, and discover why these books have become essential reading for anyone who loves the genre.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden: wizard, private investigator, and the only openly practicing magician in Chicago’s phone book. When supernatural crimes occur—and they occur with alarming frequency—Harry takes the cases police cannot solve.
Beginning with Storm Front, this urban fantasy series now spans eighteen novels of magic, mystery, and wisecracking heroism. Butcher blends noir detective sensibilities with a hidden magical world of vampires, faeries, werewolves, and things far stranger.
Harry’s particular charm lies in his stubborn insistence on doing right even when wisdom counsels otherwise. He makes jokes in the face of terror, protects the innocent at cost to himself, and maintains a battered optimism that the forces of good might occasionally triumph.
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Linus Baker loves rules and regulations. As a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, he inspects orphanages housing magical children with the bureaucratic precision of a man who has never questioned his purpose.
Then he’s sent to Marsyas Island, where six extraordinary children—including a young Antichrist—live under the care of the mysterious Arthur Parnassus. What follows is a story of prejudice confronted, hearts opened, and the discovery that family forms in the most unexpected configurations.
Gail Carriger called it “1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams.” This New York Times bestseller and Alex Award winner proves that fantasy can be gentle, affirming, and still tell stories that matter deeply.
Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
In the brutal world of Basgiath War College, dragon riders are forged through trials that kill the weak and harden the survivors. Violet Sorrengail has beaten the odds, bonding with not one but two dragons, surviving betrayals, and facing enemies both human and monstrous.
This third installment in the Empyrean series sold 2.7 million copies in its first week—more than any adult novel in twenty years. Yarros delivers romance that burns, action that thrills, and political intrigue that keeps pages turning well past sensible bedtimes.
For readers who crave dragon-riding academies, forbidden love, and stakes that never stop escalating, the Empyrean series has become essential contemporary fantasy.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
In 1714, a young French woman makes a bargain with darkness itself: freedom and immortality in exchange for her soul. The price reveals itself immediately—everyone she meets forgets her the moment she leaves their sight.
For three hundred years, Addie LaRue wanders through history, unable to leave a mark, unable to form lasting connections, unable to tell anyone her name. She plants ideas in the minds of artists, appearing again and again in paintings and songs, the only traces of a woman who cannot be remembered.
Then, in a New York bookshop, a young man looks at her and says, “I remember you.”
This novel spent thirty-seven consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Schwab explores memory, identity, and what it means to exist when no one knows you’re there. The answer, it seems, is that meaning must be created rather than found.
Finding Your Perfect Contemporary Fantasy
The genre has grown wonderfully vast. For those craving mystery, seek The Tainted Cup. For romance, Someone You Can Build a Nest In offers something genuinely new. For comfort, Legends & Lattes and The House in the Cerulean Sea provide sanctuary. For challenge, The Broken Earth trilogy rewards brave readers with unforgettable experience.
Whatever your taste, contemporary fantasy now offers magic in every flavor. The only requirement is the willingness to believe, just for a while, that the world holds more wonder than we typically permit ourselves to see.
And that, dear reader, is the most delightful sort of magic there is.
