Looking for recommendations for fantasy books that are not YA.

Is…that a thing????

Anything by VE Schwab and Jay Kristoff for starters, lol.

The Wheel of Time series

Tad Williams

Nora Roberts’ Guardians Trilogy.

I’ll recommend a bit of a slow burn that builds and builds to an unbelievably intense and complex climax. Guy Gavriel Kay’s TIGANA. All of Kay’s books are like this, but this is one of his earliest major novels. I actually prefer some of his later work, but this book really did stun me when I first read it. I think I stared off into space for at least 10 minutes in a daze right after I finished.

Kay’s novels are generally classed as historical fantasy, but they aren’t true historical fantasy in that they don’t take place in our own real world at some past point. Instead, they take place in alternate worlds but where the setting is an analogue of some historical past from our history. In this way, he creates settings that resemble Renaissance Italy, or the Byzantine Empire, or mediaeval Britain, or 8th century China, or Moorish Spain, etc. I would say that his novels are 3/4 history with 1/4 magic, but where the magic is not obvious, always subtle and usually more enigmatic. No rule-bound wizardry in his books (well, in most of his books).

Kay’s protagonists are also not your typical members of nobility or warriors or other types of individuals who are somehow exceptional as most other authors would write them. He chooses more ordinary individuals as protagonists, and many of them are artists, artisans, musicians, performers. Even in those few books of his that do feature more typical protagonists (warriors, nobility), he always infuses an aura of the arts around them with those characters able to recite poetry, for example.

His stories are very psychological, and they are always about these individuals getting caught up n the changing political and social tides during turbulent times, how they deal with such situations, and how they come out of it.

TIGANA re-creates a setting that is nominally like the city-states or kingdom-states of Renaissance Italy. And this novel deals with a people struggling not just to reclaim their homeland, but to reclaim the very memory of their homeland that has been wiped away from the consciousness of all people in the peninsula except for those who originally came from it. It’s a beautiful and very affecting book, much rawer and more visceral than some of his later works which are constructed with greater sophistication whilst maintaining the high emotional resonance of TIGANA. But the very rawness of this early work is actually in its favour.

So, this is my one recommendation for quality adult fantasy. Beautifully written, but where the prose does not hide vacuous content (as in the case with something like IN THE NAME OF THE WIND by Rothfuss).