The best fantasy books of 2026, the hype and the good stuff, kept separate

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A note on how “best” works for a current-year list: for brand-new books there’s no critical consensus yet, so the picks lean on early reviews where they exist and author pedigree where they don’t, and each entry says which. This is a living list for a year still running, dates are confirmed as of writing, and a few things will shift, which is why the page is dated and re-checked. Everything here has been verified against a publisher or retailer, and two widely-rumoured titles were left off precisely because they couldn’t be. The list splits into the blockbusters you already know are coming and the adult and literary fantasy that’s the actual reason to read it.

If you also read science fiction

Two of 2026’s most-praised speculative releases are science fiction rather than fantasy, so they’re off the list above but worth your time: Fonda Lee’s The Last Contract of Isako (Orbit, 5 May 2026), a corporate-samurai dystopian space opera reviewing superbly, and Martha Wells’s Platform Decay, the eighth Murderbot book. Both are picks on our best science fiction of 2026, with where to start each series.

For Fourth Wing, Threshing Day and the rest of the romance-led fantasy in reading order, see our best romantasy books.

The honest bit

This is a living list, which is the honest thing to say about ranking a year that hasn’t finished. Every title here was checked against a publisher or retailer, the release dates are current as of 1 September 2026, and where a book wasn’t out yet its entry says the quality is still unseen. Two 2026 titles are not here yet: Mark Lawrence’s Daughter of Crows (Harper Voyager, March 2026), the first Academy of Kindness book, which we missed when we checked on 1 September, and Leigh Bardugo’s third Alex Stern novel, Dead Beat (Flatiron, 15 September 2026), which was not yet confirmed then. Neither has been assessed for the list, and putting an unassessed book on a “best of” list is exactly the thing this page won’t do. We re-check it through the year.

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