Lose yourself in These New High Fantasy Worlds

 
In the realm of reading, there are few experiences as truly immersive as the one you get with an epic fantasy novel. As a genre, fantasy is all about world-building–distant places and times assembled from the ground up by force of pure imagination. When you read a good fantasy novel, it feels like you’ve been transported. The authors who are really good at this stuff–they’re in the transport business, really.
 
We’ve gathered below 15 new novels published this year in the genre typically referred to as epic fantasy or high fantasy. Such books tend to incorporate epic themes, clear-cut heroes and villains, rites of passage, and loooong arcs for both story and character. They’re almost always set in highly detailed, fully separate “secondary worlds” that have their own history, cosmology and magic system. For many years–decades, really–epic fantasy books tended to stick close to the traditional swords-and-sorcery approach. But adventurous readers will find there’s a lot more to enjoy these days. Contemporary authors tend to wander off into all kinds of interesting riffs and variations.
 
For instance, P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn is set in an alternate history version of Cairo, Egypt, circa 1912. Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun follows a female monk in a reimagining of 14^th century China. Son of the Storm, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, takes place in a secondary world of magic and intrigue inspired by the pre-colonial empires of West Africa.
 
Scroll over the covers below to learn more about each fantasy novel, and be sure to add the books that pique your interest to your Want to Read shelf!

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