Malazan Book of the Fallen

About the Malazan Book of the Fallen series

The Malazan Empire has spent a century conquering a continent through sorcery, siege warfare and the ascension of its soldiers to godhood, and the empire's oldest, most battle-worn armies are starting to wonder whether the throne they fight for still deserves their loyalty. Steven Erikson opens Gardens of the Moon in the middle of an already-vast, already-old world, with no orientation and no apology, and asks readers to catch up — gods walk among mortals and scheme like politicians, ten-thousand-year-old empires leave ruins that are still dangerous, and entire cultures of Elder Races carry grudges older than most fantasy settings' entire histories.

Built from a shared world Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont developed together as a tabletop role-playing campaign, the ten-book main sequence is famous for its scale: dozens of point-of-view characters, multiple simultaneous continents and wars, a deep and often withheld magic system, and a philosophical preoccupation with compassion, complicity and the cost of empire that sits underneath all the battles. It demands real patience and a willingness to be confused for a few hundred pages at a time — but it's regularly cited as one of the most ambitious and rewarding epic fantasy sagas ever completed, for readers who want scale that actually earns the word "epic."