4 best fantasy books to read if you love Elden Ring

Image: Penguin Random House

No one does highly detailed world building, strange magic systems, or charming sentient objects quite like Robert Jackson Bennett.

When Sancia Grado, a talented thief, is offered an incomprehensibly large sum of money to steal something from a heavily guarded warehouse located on the docks of Tevanne, the last thing she expects is for that artifact to have the ability to talk in her head. Or be able to rewrite magic itself by making other everyday objects sentient and convincing them that they’re something they’re not (a door can be convinced that it is unlocked or a piece of wood that it is stone). Now, with the four major merchant houses of Tevanne vying for power and hot on her heels, Sancia finds herself in the midst of a war as old as time itself. In order to protect her city, and her new friends, she must learn how to wield the power of the artifact herself before it falls into the wrong hands.

Foundryside is an ambitious novel to say the least, and if readers enjoy it, then there are two more in the series to read as well.

Foundryside is available for as low as $17.71 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org

Image: Macmillan

From the moment he first appears on the page, it’s hard not to love Kinch Na Shannack. Quick-witted and sarcastic, Kinch is adept at lock-picking, setting traps, and weaving lies (amongst other tricks that come in handy as a thief), but his luck has finally run out. Kinch owes the Takers Guild an insurmountable amount of money for his education, and they’ve finally come calling.

But what begins as a simple quest to pay back his debt takes a turn when Kinch ambushes Galva, a knight who survived the goblin war and is searching for her missing queen.

Epic in scale and filled with magical tattoos, massive war corvids, assassins, witches, and bloodthirsty goblins, The Blacktongue Thief is a blast from start to finish. While there isn’t just one epic battle, fights are frequent and quite brutal, and both Kinch and Galva often find themselves in over their heads. And in a war-torn world where magic is strange, goblins are hungry, and honor is hard to come by, they must learn to trust each other and work together in order to survive.

The Blacktongue Thief, like Foundryside, is the first in a series. Readers can learn more about Galva and her brothers in The Daughters’ War and can catch up with Kinch when The Thrice-Bound Fool comes out in October of 2026.

The Blacktongue Thief is available for as low as $11.39 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org

Image: Macmillan

Europe is falling apart. Beset by plague and famine, and with literal man-eating monsters lurking in the shadows, there’s very little to be hopeful for.

But when Brother Diaz arrives at the Sacred City, he can’t help but hope that it will be to fulfill some grand, holy assignment for his superiors. Instead, he’s tasked with helping to get Alex, a petty thief, on the throne of Troy in order to unite the church and stop the apocalypse. In order to do so, Brother Diaz must lead a Suicide Squad-esque team comprised of literal monsters to fight the monsters (both human and otherwise) who stand in their way.

The result is a bloodbath.

The Devils is grim, caked in filth, and easily one of the most entertaining fantasy novels to come out in recent years. If you’re an Elden Ring player who loves its sense of divine order versus new world order, this one is for you.

The Devils is available for as low as $17.71 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org

Image: Macmillan

Set in a kingdom that finds itself at war with man and monster alike, Fonda Lee’s epic fantasy novella, Untethered Sky, tells the story of Ester, a young woman who lost her mother and baby brother in a gruesome manticore attack when she was a girl. Burdened by guilt and haunted by the manticore’s heterochromatic eyes, Ester’s thirst for revenge brings her to the King’s Royal Mews where she becomes a rhuker and is charged with training a fledgling roc (a massive bird of prey) called Zahra.

Roc’s are stubborn and violent creatures, not unlike Ester herself when readers first encounter her. But it’s through her relationship with Zahra that Ester begins to process her grief and finds purpose again.

While there’s no spectral steed present in Untethered Sky to help Ester traverse the world, she does hunt and kill manticore on the back of a giant raptor, which is arguably just as cool. And at only 160 pages, you should be able to squeeze this one between Nightreign sessions.

Untethered Sky is available for as low as $17.71 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org