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2026 is shaping up to be one of the strongest years for fantasy fiction in recent memory. A dark academia descent into Hell that became an instant bestseller. A record-breaking debut from a fanfiction writer turned literary phenomenon. A grimdark masterpiece from a genre titan returning to his darkest roots. An Indigenous dragon-rider fighting colonial systems from the inside. And a beloved thief whose most dangerous enemy yet is a book.
There’s something here for everyone — and every book on this list earns its place.
1. Katabasis — R.F. Kuang
Published: August 26, 2025 | Publisher: Harper Voyager | Pages: 560 | Genre: Dark Academia Fantasy | Setting: 1980s Cambridge, England
Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi — that’s how HarperCollins describes this book, and it’s not wrong.
What It’s About
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of analytic Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality — her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.
Then Grimes dies in a magical accident that could possibly be Alice’s fault. He descends into Hell. And Alice, along with her rival Peter Murdoch, has no choice but to follow — because his letter of recommendation could hold her entire future in his now-incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams.
Katabasis is structured as a descent narrative modelled on Dante’s Inferno, set in 1980s Cambridge and filtered entirely through the world of modern academia. The Hell Kuang builds isn’t fire and brimstone. It’s a place of upside-down rules, hyperbolic geometry, and bureaucratic paradox. Anyone who has survived postgraduate education will recognise it immediately.
Kuang wrote the book while enrolled as a PhD student in East Asian Languages at Yale, teaching undergraduates, and planning her wedding — her husband’s diagnosis with Crohn’s disease in the first months of their PhDs quietly shaped the novel’s themes of body, illness, and escape. She considers Katabasis and Babel a dark academic duology: both, she has said, are “examinations of the university and its problems — and the really weird type of person who decides to stay in academia anyway.”
What Makes It Special
Kuang has a pattern. Babel took a scalpel to colonialism and linguistic power. Yellowface eviscerated publishing. Katabasis — her sixth novel overall — turns the same blade on academia: the toxic mentorship that masquerades as guidance, the self-erasure demanded of ambitious students, the way institutions devour the people who love them most.
What keeps it from being a simple takedown is that Kuang clearly loves the life of the mind. Alice’s obsession with being intellectually seen is written with real tenderness before it’s carefully dismantled. The emotional core — Alice reckoning with how much of herself she’s traded away for external validation — lands hard because it’s true.
The Guardian compared it to “David Lodge with demons” and called it “a celebration of the acrobatics of thought.” Kirkus gave it a starred review: “A learned, literary manifesto on academia — and its darkness.” The New York Times praised its “devastatingly real characters and absorbing world building.” Not everyone agreed: the Washington Post called it “bloated and tedious,” and Slate noted that “Kuang’s abiding weakness as a novelist lies with character.” Those criticisms have merit. But the ambition is real.
Katabasis debuted at number one on both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists and spent five consecutive weeks on the latter. It was named one of the BBC’s 25 best books of 2025 and has been optioned by Amazon MGM Studios for television — with The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang attached to write and produce.
Who Should Read It
Readers who loved Babel, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, or Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. Literary fantasy fans who want their magic to carry intellectual weight. If you want fast-paced action, look elsewhere. If you find philosophical arguments genuinely exciting, you may never want it to end.
Verdict
One of the most intellectually ambitious fantasy novels in years. Not flawless, but deeply memorable. 4.5/5
2. Alchemised — SenLinYu
Published: September 23, 2025 | Publisher: Del Rey (US) / Penguin Michael Joseph (UK) | Genre: Dark Fantasy | Standalone novel
What It’s About
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner — of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed with iron manacles, and the world she knew destroyed. In the aftermath of a long civil war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers holds her captive.
According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture — making her captors wonder: is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?
To uncover the memories buried in her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve — Kaine Ferron, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world order, and her former academic rival. Trapped on his crumbling estate at Spirefell, under the watchful gaze of Kaine and his wife Aurelia, Helena’s fight to protect her lost history and preserve the last shreds of herself is just beginning.
Alchemised is a reimagining of SenLinYu’s fan fiction Manacled, a dark alternate-universe story that drew inspiration from The Handmaid’s Tale and had accumulated over 20 million downloads on Archive of Our Own before being removed on January 1, 2025. The published novel is a fully original work — original characters, original world, entirely new magic system — though the emotional architecture and nonlinear structure are preserved. SenLinYu (she/they) described the process of stripping the story of its source material’s intellectual property as “liberating.”
What Makes It Special
What’s remarkable about Alchemised is that it earns its extraordinary pre-publication hype. SenLinYu has built one of the most intricate magic systems in recent fantasy: alchemy, vivimancy, necromancy, and animancy all operating on a foundation of resonance — the energy emitted by people, metals, and even emotions. The magic saturates the entire world, changes how people live and die and grieve, and functions as both literal mechanism and symbolic language for the story’s themes of control and survival.
The imagery is unforgettable. Corpses reanimated as soldiers and servants. Streets that smell of rot. A throne constructed from living bodies. The horror is visceral, and it earns it.
The central relationship is the book’s true achievement. The enemies-to-lovers dynamic works because the distrust between Helena and Kaine is earned across hundreds of pages — no shortcuts, no sudden pivots. SenLinYu has described wanting their relationship to be “a need for one another that was forged in the text, rather than being lust-driven, or a rapid infatuation.” That’s exactly what it is.
Paste Magazine noted the romantic scenes become repetitive, and secondary characters are “fairly thinly sketched at best.” Those points are fair. But for readers who want deep immersion in a fully realised dark world, very few books this year come close.
Alchemised hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list in its debut week, remained on the combined print and e-book fiction list for 15 consecutive weeks, sold over one million copies, and was released in an initial print run of 750,000 — the largest for a debut in Penguin’s recent history. It won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Readers’ Favourite Debut Novel. Legendary Entertainment acquired the film rights in a seven-figure deal exceeding $3 million.
Who Should Read It
Readers who want dark fantasy with genuine weight beneath the romance. Anyone who loves enormous, immersive books. Note: this novel contains very dark themes including torture, war, forced sterilisation, and the psychological effects of prolonged trauma. It is not a comfortable read. It is a memorable one.
Verdict
An astonishing debut. Dense, brutal, and emotionally devastating — in the best possible way. 4.5/5
3. Daughter of Crows — Mark Lawrence
Published: March 24, 2026 (US) / March 26, 2026 (UK) | Publisher: Ace (US) / HarperVoyager (UK) | Pages: 416 | Genre: Grimdark Fantasy | Series: The Academy of Kindness trilogy, Book 1
What It’s About
The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies — known as the kindly ones — against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.
The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden and learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.
Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. Rue sold herself.
Decades later, she is exactly what the Academy made her. Now an elderly woman living quietly in a remote village, she has outlived her enemies and is slowly shedding the burdens that once defined her. Then mercenaries arrive in the market town of Stones Corner. They have to be here for her — nothing else makes any sense. That was a mistake.
The novel moves across multiple timelines: present-day Rue hunting the people who have disturbed her peace; flashback chapters following three girls — Bek, Einsa, and Mollandra — being forged inside the Academy; and an ancient figure whose thread gradually reveals what connects the timelines.
What Makes It Special
Mark Lawrence built his reputation on grimdark fiction. Prince of Thorns gave the genre one of its most memorably unpleasant protagonists. The Broken Empire trilogy remains a touchstone. His recent work moved toward something gentler. Daughter of Crows is a deliberate, confident return to darkness.
Grimdark Magazine, in a full review, called it “stylistically Lawrence’s best work to date” and praised its “narrative voice [that] is measured, deliberate, and confident, delivering its blows with precision rather than excess.” Fantasy Book Critic was even more direct: “It’s also his best novel so far.” One early reader’s verdict: “I may have just found my favorite book of 2026. It’s going to take something extraordinary to beat it.”
Rue is the reason. Fantasy almost never gives us elderly female protagonists — and almost never ones this dangerous, this dry, or this compelling to follow. The mythology Lawrence builds — Furies, vengeance cults, divine bargains, afterlife mechanics — is used to ask a question that runs through every page: is justice simply cruelty held at a different angle?
This is dark in the way good grimdark is dark. Children die. Mercy is genuinely rare. Some scenes edge into horror. And yet Lawrence finds room for perfectly timed dry humour. The most-quoted line: Rue considers bringing the severed heads of her kills as proof, then decides against it because the brothers had been balding beneath their caps, and heads without hair are awkward to carry. That line tells you exactly who Rue is. Practical. Violent. Mildly inconvenienced by logistics.
Who Should Read It
Essential reading for Mark Lawrence fans, especially those who loved The Broken Empire. Grimdark readers who want a genuinely compelling older female protagonist. If Prince of Thorns’ teenage nihilism put you off Lawrence previously, Rue is your way back in.
Verdict
Lawrence’s most exciting series opener in years — and by many accounts, his best novel. 5/5
🛒 Buy Daughter of Crows on Amazon
4. To Ride a Rising Storm — Moniquill Blackgoose
Published: January 27, 2026 | Publisher: Del Rey | Genre: Epic Fantasy | Series: Nampeshiweisit, Book 2 | National Bestseller
What It’s About
Anequs has not only survived her first year at Kuiper’s Academy — she has exceeded her professors’ admittedly low expectations and passed all her courses with honours. Now she and her dragon Kasaqua are headed home for the summer, along with Theod, the only other native student at the Academy.
What should have been a restful break takes a darker turn immediately. Thanks to Anequs’s growing notoriety as a native dragoneer, there is an Anglish presence on her island of Masquapaug for the first time ever — a presence she hates. The widening political fracture between Anglish factions, one grudgingly tolerant of native rights and one loudly opposed, turns her home into a flashpoint. Anequs will always fight for what she believes in: her people’s right to self-govern and live as they have for generations.
What Makes It Special
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, the first book in this series, won both the Nebula Award and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. Moniquill Blackgoose is an enrolled member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe and a lineal descendant of Ousamequin Massasoit — and the cultural depth she brings to this world is not incidental. It is the architecture the entire series is built on.
To Ride a Rising Storm deepens everything the first book established. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it “the smart and exciting sequel that digs into the colonialism and classism of magic academy and dragon rider tropes.” The political stakes are genuinely consequential — not as backdrop, but as lived reality. Blackgoose writes about colonial systems with unusual precision: not just that they cause harm, but how they operate, where their contradictions are, and what kinds of intelligence and strategy are required to navigate or resist them.
Crucially, Blackgoose doesn’t let Anequs’s nominal Anglish allies off the hook. Some of what the Jarl and his people do in this book is deeply concerning even when directed at the people who want Anequs dead — and experiencing this through Anequs’s perspective, not a generic fantasy protagonist’s, makes all the difference.
The dragon-bond between Anequs and Kasaqua remains one of the most emotionally honest portrayals in the genre. Kasaqua is not a symbol or a weapon — she’s a character, and the trust between her and Anequs is the emotional spine of the series.
Who Should Read It
Read To Shape a Dragon’s Breath first — the sequel builds directly on it. Readers who want epic fantasy that engages seriously with history and power. Dragon fans tired of European-medieval templates. Anyone who appreciated N.K. Jemisin’s approach of using genre to think rigorously about how systems of oppression function.
Verdict
A smart, politically engaged, emotionally honest sequel. 4.5/5
🛒 Buy To Ride a Rising Storm on Amazon
5. The Thrice-Bound Fool — Christopher Buehlman
Pre-order / Releases: October 13, 2026 | Publisher: Tor Books (US) / Gollancz (UK) | Genre: Grimdark Adventure | Series: Blacktongue, Book 2
What It’s About
Professional thief and inveterate trickster Kinch Na Shannack has always enjoyed a good book. But now his life — and the future of all of Manreach — depends on him deciphering a very bad book indeed: a stolen, sentient tome that tries to kill him every time he opens it, and often when it’s closed.
Galva, veteran of the goblin wars and death’s sworn handmaiden, has vowed to protect Kinch while he mines the book for its dark magic and even darker secrets. She does so not for Kinch’s sake — though the cheeky bastard is growing on her — but because the book is the key to stopping the shadowy tyrants out to kill the queen she serves, and loves. The ruthless, all-seeing Taker’s Guild dogs their every step, and thief and knight must flee the known world entirely if they hope to succeed in their mission.
What Makes It Special
The Blacktongue series occupies a specific niche: it’s genuinely, consistently funny without losing its grimdark edge. Buehlman writes action with kinetic energy and then immediately undercuts the tension with a perfectly timed piece of dry wit from Kinch. The balance works because Kinch’s voice is so precisely calibrated — sardonic, self-aware, capable of unexpected warmth.
The world-building texture is what sets Buehlman apart. Manreach is defined by a goblin war the survivors barely won, and every element of its culture and magic reflects the long shadow of that trauma. Stag-sized battle ravens. Assassins who kill with living tattoos. A thieves’ guild with genuine institutional weight. It’s a grim world, but not a miserable one.
The key to this sequel is Galva. In a 2026 interview with Grimdark Magazine, Buehlman explained exactly what the book is built on: “Tor gave me — and readers of this series — a tremendous gift when they signed on with having me write The Daughters’ War, prequel to Blacktongue, before the sequel. What resulted in the sequel was my greater understanding of — and love for — the character of Galva dom Braga, and my ability to animate her more credibly. The engine of the Thrice-Bound Fool is the relationship between this highly moral, physically dangerous, deeply hurt warrior and the transgressive, vulgar, mischievous thief she has been tasked with protecting. I can’t wait to share their story.”
He added that he had to write the prequel specifically because Galva was “quite opaque in the first book” — and in The Daughters’ War he discovered why she is so slow to make a gift of her trust.
This is a pre-order recommendation made with confidence based on the quality of both previous Blacktongue books.
Who Should Read It
Start with The Blacktongue Thief first — don’t come here cold. Fans of Joe Abercrombie or Scott Lynch who want something funnier and warmer. Anyone who wants grimdark that knows exactly when to laugh at itself.
Verdict
Everything the setup promises. If you love this series, October cannot come soon enough. Pre-order strongly recommended.
🛒 Pre-order The Thrice-Bound Fool on Amazon
Final Thoughts
Five very different books. A philosophical descent into 1980s academic Hell. A thousand-page dark fantasy about war, alchemy, and the ethics of memory. A grimdark novel about an elderly woman forged as a weapon who cannot quite stop being one. An Indigenous dragon-rider fighting colonial institutions from the inside. A thief and a knight trying to decode a book that wants them dead.
That’s what a good year in fantasy looks like.
If I had to match a single book to a single reader:
- You want to think: Katabasis
- You want to feel: Alchemised
- You want the best grimdark of the year: Daughter of Crows
- You want fantasy that takes politics seriously: To Ride a Rising Storm
- You want to laugh while fearing for everyone: The Thrice-Bound Fool (out October 2026)
Any of them is worth your time. Happy reading.
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