The Ninth Rain by Jen Williams

The great city of Ebora once glittered with gold, but its god is dead and the once grand city is crumbling to pieces around the few survivors. Tormalin the Oathless has no desire to sit around and wait to die so he abandons Ebora to be among the living, where there are taverns full of women and wine. When eccentric scholar, Lady Vincenza de Grazon, takes him on as a hired sword, he eagerly agrees even when the job involves facing down monsters and retrieving ancient artefacts. Even when they are joined by a fugitive witch with a tendency to set things on fire, Tormalin has no intention of ever returning home.  But not everyone is as willing to let Ebora fade away, and Tormalin is slowly drawn into a tangled mystery centuries in the making.

The Ninth Rain is a hefty classical-style high fantasy, and the first book of the Winnowing Flame trilogy. If I'm being honest, I found it quite hard to get into at the beginning and wasn't entirely convinced about the whole concept of alien invasions in a fantasy world. Also, there was a LOT crammed into a few short chapters with witches, vampires, monster plants, and aliens. And yet, once the story really got going, it all kind of works. The world-building is rich and detailed and so cleverly done so that it fades into the background - you always know what you need to know, but the story never gets bogged down by exposition. 

Also, I really liked the diverse and lovable characters, particularly the three protagonists who are the heart of the story, and their experiences give The Ninth Rain its depth and complexity. I rooted for all of them, and the banter between them made me giggle. Plot-wise, like I said, The Ninth Rain started slow and the 'OMG, I have to know what happens next!' page-turning feeling didn't hit me until about a quarter into the book. However, once that happened, I flew through the chapters as the characters became more and more entangled in a web of magic, prophecy, and ancient mysteries.

Original, fun to read and full of diverse and likeable characters, The Ninth Rain is a great start to an exciting fantasy series. Get through the first few chapters, and you'll be rewarded with a story full of heart, humour, and heroics.

Recommended For: Fans of classical fantasy full of quests, magical creatures, ancient enemies, and heroes you can root for.

Read On: The next book in the trilogy is The Bitter Twins. If you love epic fantasy with a lot of heart, you'll like the Amra Thetys series by Michael McClung - the first book is The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

As Sancia Grado lay facedown in the mud, stuffed underneath the wooden deck next to the old stone wall, she reflected that this evening was not going at all as she had wanted.

There's not much in the way of work for an escaped slave like Sancia Grado, but she has an unnatural talent that makes her one of the best thieves in the city of Tevanne. When she's offered a lucrative job to steal an ancient artefact from a heavily guarded warehouse, Sancia agrees, dreaming of leaving the city behind - but instead, she finds herself the target of a murderous conspiracy. Someone powerful in Tevanne wants the artefact, and intends to kill Sancia to get it.

Foundryside is a action-packed epic fantasy full of heists, innovative magic, and ancient mysteries. It's exactly the kind of fantasy I love with immersive world-building, a magic system with rules, tangled politics, a clever protagonist, and a dangerous conspiracy right at the centre of it all. I really liked the characters, especially Sancia, and the banter between them adds a sly humour to a dark tale. Honestly, just a fab book, and I can't wait for the sequel to come out!

Recommended For: Fans of slightly darker fantasy with imaginative magic systems.

Read On: Other fantasy stories involving the problems of stealing something that you probably shouldn't have are The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes and Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. And if you like Robert Jackson Bennett, try his Divine Cities trilogy, beginning with City of Stairs.

The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes

When the most powerful man in the Republic murders her family, steals her family's valuable manuscript, and frames her for treason, former army scout Loch plans her revenge. The plan? Break out of jail, assemble a crack team of magical misfits, sneak into the floating fortress of Heaven's Spire, and steal the manuscript back. What could possibly go wrong?

The Palace Job is a very enjoyable high fantasy comic crime caper, and the first book in the Rogues of the Republic trilogy. The action-packed plot rattles along at a heady pace as the crew's best laid plans go quickly awry, and there were enough twists and turns and last minute disasters to keep me interested right until the end. The characters were a bunch of eccentric but lovable rogues, and the banter between them often left a grin on my face. However, The Palace Job is very much a book which exists in the moment and so there's little in the way of character development or back story. The relationships between the characters were relatively uncomplicated, and there wasn't much emotional depth to any of them. 

The same could be said for the world building. The Palace Job is crammed full of imaginative ideas - airships, a floating capital city, all sorts of magical critters in the woods, a shape-shifting unicorn - but the world itself is left a bit of a blank. The rattling pace gives little time to explore any more than the most basic of this world's history, politics, and culture. I did like, however, that Patrick Weekes explored themes of racism with the minority ethnic characters having to deal with prejudice and suspicion.

At its heart, The Palace Job is a tongue-in-cheek action-packed crime caper set in a high fantasy world. It never takes itself too seriously, and what it lacks in depth it more than makes up for in exuberance and sheer fun.

Recommended For: People who like easy to read, fast-paced comic fantasy, or fantasy fans looking for a break from their recent angsty epic reading.

Read On: The next book in the series is The Prophecy Con. Other fun comic fantasies include Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher, and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett.

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

Freed slave Zacharias Wythe is the first black sorcerer in Britain - and he's at his wits end. Not happy about a black man holding the staff of the Sorcerer Royal, Britain's aristocratic magicians are undermining him at every turn. In fact, someone is so unhappy about it that they keep trying to kill him. Making his position even more precarious is the closure of Britain's border with Fairyland which is causing Britain's atmospheric magic levels to drop dangerously low. With all this going on, the last thing he needs is an extremely talented but exasperating young student who insists on breaking every rule in magical society.

Sorcerer to the Crown is an imaginative and funny romp with sparkling prose and surprisingly biting social observations about race, class and gender. Fantasies set in regency London have been done before, but the diverse set of characters is new and both protagonists - one a freed slave, the other a mixed race woman - face prejudices that add a more unique aspect to a well worn setting. However, I felt that Sorcerer to the Crown was not quite sure what it wanted to be. The plot was definitely underdeveloped and lurched from a romance to a comedy of manners to an Austenesque social commentary and back again, and so I found it hard to keep track of what the hell was going on. Either the book needed to be longer, or some of the most absurd parts of the plot needed to be cut. That being said, I liked Sorcerer to the Crown, but I didn't love it as much as I thought I would.

Recommended for: Anyone who likes their fantasy light and humorous.

Rating: I liked it, but didn't love it. Three stars on Goodreads. 

Read On: Sorcerer to the Crown is the first book in a planned trilogy with the second book, Sorcerer Royal due to be published later this year. Other historical fantasies with a 19th century British setting include Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and Soulless by Gail Carriger.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

The Stillness is a world - maybe ours in the future, maybe an alternate Earth - where catastrophic earthquakes can swallow civilisations and bring humans to the brink of extinction. Orogenes, those with the ability to control the shaking, are feared and reviled - but tolerated as long as they protect society. Essun is one of these orogenes. Until now, she's kept her head down but now her son is dead, her daughter has gone missing, and she will rip the Earth apart to get her back.

The Fifth Season is an adult fantasy that gripped me from the first page and didn't let me go until I finished it, heartbroken, three days later. It was everything I didn't know I wanted from a fantasy book. The world-building was truly original, the plot twisted and turned, and the characters were incredibly diverse, representing a spectrum of ethnicities, age, and sexuality. A word of warning though, this is a book that requires patience at the beginning as the first chapters are written in the second person and in present tense - an unsettling and unusual combination that took some getting used to.

I cannot put into words how much I loved this book. It's beautifully written and seamless and clever and heartbreaking. It's a story about the end of the world, about a mother's guilt and sacrifice, about revenge and prejudice, and the tiny sparks of hope that keep people going. It's dark, it's original, and it holds a mirror to reflect the uncomfortable realities of our society. N.K. Jemisin has won the Hugo Award two years running for a reason.

Recommended For: Fans of dark, original and diverse fantasy.

Rating: Five stars on Goodreads. Obviously.

Read On: The next book in the Broken Earth series is The Obelisk Gate. Another highly rated book by the same author is A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.