r/Fantasy · 2020
Top books in r/Fantasy during 2020
Ranked by mentions in r/Fantasy threads dated 2020. Useful for spotting what r/Fantasy was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
A suicidal bridge slave assigned to the war camp's deadliest crew starts hearing storms answer when he gives orders.
#2 Gardens of the Moon
Steven Erikson
An empire quietly marks its own soldiers for death, and the gods are already choosing sides before the Bridgeburners find out.
#3 Mistborn: The Final Empire
Brandon Sanderson
A street thief gets recruited into a heist crew plotting to overthrow a god-emperor who has ruled unchallenged for a thousand years.
#4 The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
A farm boy's village burns in one night, and the Aes Sedai who saves him says the Dark One marked him before he could walk.
#5 The Blade Itself
Joe Abercrombie
Nine-Fingers the barbarian just wants to survive one more winter, but a torturer's investigation and a prince's war have other plans.
#6 A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin
A direwolf litter found beside a dead stag opens a decades-spanning war for the Iron Throne with no guaranteed survivors.
#7 Assassin's Apprentice
Robin Hobb
A bastard prince trained as an assassin narrates sixteen books of loss, loyalty, and one very long grudge against fate.
#8 The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
A gardener, a burglar's heir, and seven others walk a piece of jewelry to a volcano because destroying it is the only way to stop a war.
#9 The Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
An orphaned actor's son claws his way toward becoming a legend by the University's fire-and-sympathy magic — a story stuck at book two for over a decade.
#10 The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
A woman searches a dying continent for the daughter her husband stole, while the world ends again on schedule.
#11 Storm Front (The Dresden Files)
Jim Butcher
Harry Dresden, Chicago's only wizard listed in the phone book, takes a double-murder case that ordinary police work can't touch.
#12 The Lies of Locke Lamora
Scott Lynch
A gang of con artists is three months into robbing the city's nobility when a rival crime lord starts murdering their kind for sport.
#13 A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin
A prideful young mage summons a nameless shadow to prove his power, then spends years learning to face it instead of running.
#14 Red Rising
Pierce Brown
A miner's son fakes his way into the ruling class's brutal war-games academy to bring down the system that executed his wife.
#15 The Black Company
Glen Cook
A mercenary company's own physician keeps its journal through the Vietnam War on peyote, one contract and one dead wizard-lord at a time.
#16 The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
A burglar with no interest in adventure gets talked into robbing a dragon by a wizard who never quite explains the plan.
#17 The Goblin Emperor
Katherine Addison
An exiled half-goblin prince inherits a throne he never wanted after an airship 'accident' kills his father and half-brothers.
#18 The Poppy War
R. F. Kuang
A war orphan tests into an elite military academy, awakens the power of a fire god, and becomes the architect of the genocide the history books warned about.
#19 Kings of the Wyld
Nicholas Eames
A retired warrior with a ruined face and a new baby reunites his aging mercenary band for one last impossible job.
#20 Dune
Frank Herbert
A duke's son survives his family's betrayal on a desert planet and becomes the prophet who leads its people to war.
#21 Prince of Thorns
Mark Lawrence
Jorg Ancrath watches his mother and brother die, then spends four books becoming exactly the kind of monster who did it.
#22 Spinning Silver
Naomi Novik
A moneylender's daughter boasts she can turn silver into gold, and the winter king of the Staryk takes her up on it, then takes her as his wife.
#23 The Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
A peasant girl in medieval Russia can see the spirits her village stopped honoring, and only she notices the frost demon isn't a fairy tale.
#24 Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Six criminals with nothing in common but debt attempt an impossible heist inside the world's most guarded fortress.
#25 Tigana
Guy Gavriel Kay
A tyrant erases his conquered province's name from every mind that could remember it, and a handful of survivors fight to bring it back.