
From A Game of Thrones to The Hobbit: 18 of the best fantasy novels of all time
Open up a fantasy novel and you'll be transported to magical worlds unlike our own and encounter brave heroes, powerful wizards, and many devious foes.For this list I've picked out 18 of the best fantasy novels ever written. Because fantasy fiction loves a saga, these are almost all the first books in trilogies or even longer series. I've opted for one book per author, with one very notable exception (you can probably guess who that is).From all time classics like The Hobbit, to newer works like The Lies of Locke Lamora and Piranesi – one of my favorite books of all time – there's loads to choose from here.
- ▪Open up a fantasy novel and you'll be transported to magical worlds unlike our own and encounter brave heroes, powerful wizards, and many devious foes.For this list I've picked out 18 of the best fantasy novels ever written.
- ▪Because fantasy fiction loves a saga, these are almost all the first books in trilogies or even longer series.
- ▪I've opted for one book per author, with one very notable exception (you can probably guess who that is).From all time classics like The Hobbit, to newer works like The Lies of Locke Lamora and Piranesi – one of my favorite books of all tim
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| Original publisher | Tom's Guide |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/movies/from-a-game-of-thrones-to-the-hobbit-18-of-the-best-fantasy-novels-of-all-time |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T15:11:52.046Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T15:11:52.046Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | O5Z-h9bI52jx · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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(Image credit: Margaret K. McElderry Books, Clarion, Bantam Dell, Tor Books) Copy link Facebook X Reddit Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Fantasy fiction is one of the most enchanting genres there is. Open up a fantasy novel and you'll be transported to magical worlds unlike our own and encounter brave heroes, powerful wizards, and many devious foes.For this list I've picked out 18 of the best fantasy novels ever written. Because fantasy fiction loves a saga, these are almost all the first books in trilogies or even longer series.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Guide.