Top 10 Fantasy Books to Read If You’re a ‘Game of Thrones’ Fan

With George R.R. Martin being nowhere near finishing the Game of Thrones books, fans are starting to look toward other stories to recreate that Westeros magic for them.

There’s no denying that the Game of Thrones book series is one of the most prominent works of modernist high fantasy to come out in the past couple of decades. Due to the story’s sense of intrigue, amazing characterization, morally grey narrative, and intricate worldbuilding inspired by real historical events, A Song of Ice and Fire is now among the best works in literature, and in no small part thanks to HBO’s overwhelmingly popular live-action adaptation.

Well, since that television show ended abysmally and George R.R. Martin is still struggling to bring The Winds of Winter — the sixth and penultimate book in the saga — to completion, perhaps it’s high time that we looked at other great works in the speculative storytelling spectrum to fill the arid void left by the unfinished saga of the Seven Kingdoms. 

We’ve already gone through another similar list in the form of the top 10 books to read if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, but if you find that George R.R. Martin’s more contemporaneous style is more to your liking, then these are the books that you should pick up as soon as you can. And who knows? Maybe you’ll enjoy some of them even more than you did A Song of Ice and Fire.

10. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny was one of the most important fantasy writers in history, having influenced many of his successors, notably Neil Gaiman. The Chronicles of Amber, his magnum opus, is a 10-book series taking place in two opposite worlds, Amber and Chaos. The plot mostly follows members of the royal Amber family, who can traverse the worlds between Amber and Chaos — called Shadows — and inflict their will on reality to change it.

As the story progresses, you realize that the series is about the political intrigue sitting at the heart of the Amber court, and how each family member is vying for the throne. It also depicts the struggles and differences of relatives, similar to the familial-drama backdrop of Game of Thrones.

9. The Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks

The Lightbringer Series is a collection of five fantasy books that start with 2010’s best-seller The Black Prism and end with 2019’s The Burning White. Brent Weeks centers his world around a very peculiar form of magic that’s derived from light, with each light turning into a substance called Luxin. 

While that doesn’t sound similar to Game of Thrones and its subtle magic system at all, Lightbringer’s fictional world and political landscape feature the same sort of complicated intrigue as our main character Gavin Guile and his brother Andross Guile — influential people in their own right — navigate this increasingly treacherous world.