# The 10 Best Fantasy Novels of 2026

> Gilded Age gothics, dark-academia murder, necromancy in Victorian London and long-awaited sequels share one shelf here. The year's fantasy, two covers at a time.

*By YPB Team · Published October 25, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-10-best-fantasy-novels-of-2026*

---

## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Angel Country**
   Alex T. Singer's October 2026 cosmic-horror fantasy about a scientist who claws out of her own grave in an alternate 1904 to chase the partner who stole her angel-communication prototype.
2. **The Scarlet Ball**
   Nghi Vo's October 2026 Gilded Age gothic, in which a former convent girl takes a missing heiress's face to enter New York's Four Hundred and its rituals of demonic marriage.
3. **Bodies of Magic**
   Freya Marske's September 2026 dark-academia fantasy, where five healer-mages must solve a classmate's murder during their five-day Grand Exam.
4. **A Dance of Burning Blades**
   The August 2026 second book of M. H. Ayinde's Invoker Trilogy, an epic of warring clans and ancestor magic across the Nine Lands.
5. **Misery's Wife**
   Joan Tierney's July 2026 queer reimagining of a Portuguese folktale, about a young trans woman setting out to rescue her sister from the King of Misery.
6. **The Halls of the Dead**
   S. M. Hallow's August 2026 queer gothic novel set in a necromancy-tinged 1849 London, where a necromancer tries to raise the woman she loves.
7. **Steel Gods**
   Richard Swan's March 2026 dark fantasy from Orbit, the second novel of the Great Silence trilogy after Grave Empire.
8. **Dead Beat**
   Leigh Bardugo's September 2026 third Alex Stern novel, continuing the occult series set among Yale's secret societies.
9. **The Thrice-Bound Fool**
   Christopher Buehlman's October 2026 second Blacktongue novel, the follow-up to The Blacktongue Thief.
10. **The Dawn Throne**
   Tara Sim's June 2026 installment of the Dark Gods series from Orbit, following the heirs as they pick up the pieces of their lives.

Tags: fantasy, books, 2026