Best Urban Fantasy
Last updated: July 20, 2024
Books of urban fantasy (defined by Merriam-Webster as "a genre of imaginative fiction featuring supernatural characters or elements in an urban setting") that have been recommended on Five Books.
“It is intricate. It is beautiful. Diana Wynne-Jones, as a writer, was incredibly fond of things that recontextualized everything. She included a conceit in Fire and Hemlock of these vases which would rotate when you pulled a lever: sometimes they would say ‘now here,’ but if you got them at exactly the right angle, they would say ‘nowhere.’ And that blew my mind as a nine-year-old; that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.” Read more...
Seanan McGuire, Novelist
“Tanya Huff is one of the mothers of urban fantasy as we currently recognize the genre. She was there pretty much from the beginning. But for some reason, while she has always performed solidly—there’s been a TV adaptation of one of her series, and she’s been publishing consistently for more than thirty years now—most people don’t know her. And I just don’t understand that!” Read more...
Seanan McGuire, Novelist
“Kelly Armstrong is a fantastic urban fantasy author, who I feel doesn’t get quite as much attention as I would expect her to.” Read more...
Seanan McGuire, Novelist
“The Heroine Complex books came out at a time when people were saying that they wanted to see more diverse urban fantasy. In the first book, we have Evie Tanaka and Aveda Jupiter. Aveda is Evie’s childhood best friend and has become the most beloved superhero in San Francisco. She has turned being a superhero into being a Kardashian. She’s a star. She’s always perfect. She doesn’t eat carbs. Her clothes always fit. She can kick your butt in six-inch heels. Then there’s Evie, who is a little more relatable to a lot of us, who also has some superpowers—but her superpowers have never seemed to be quite as powerful or marketable as Aveda’s.” Read more...
Seanan McGuire, Novelist
“Stephen Brust is an amazing fantasy writer…It’s a book about a conspiracy to do good things in the world, a conspiracy to make other people happy…Conspiracies play a large place in noir. Often, the thing that’s being unwound by the noir protagonist is a conspiracy. In this case, the noir protagonist is the conspiracist. He’s part of a conspiracy, and it is in the nature of conspiracies that they often contain conspiracies of their own…What really conveys the noir flavor, as with all of Brust’s work, is his impeccable, absolutely brilliant, dry, noir voice. It’s funny, it’s wry, it’s understated. He is a genius in every way. The language is delicious, and the dialogue and the characters are great. You want to be around a bar with this group of characters.” Read more...
Cory Doctorow, Novelist
Moon Called
by Patricia Briggs
Moon Called is the first book in the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs
“This is an urban fantasy series about a coyote shapeshifter named Mercy Thompson. She works as a mechanic in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state. These books initially straddle the line between open magic and secret magic. The fae are the only-non human group that is currently ‘out’ as the series starts, but there are also vampires, werewolves, witches, and other magic creatures going bump in the night, so to speak. Mercy is a mechanic, both literally and figuratively speaking. She fixes cars—primarily Volkswagens—and solves paranormal problems between the various factions in this Tri-Cities area. In the first book, Mercy helps a werewolf who shows up at her shop looking for work. It turns out he is being chased by evil people who want to run experiments on him.” Read more...
The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples
Valerie Valdes, Novelist
“There’s a murder investigation and there are two cities that exist side by side, overlapping each other. Their relationship is unclear right at the beginning: they occupy the same geographical space, theoretically in Eastern Europe, but they are two different cities by custom and law. If something comes from one city into the other, it’s called breaching. And breaching is considered a crime worse than murder. It’s one of those books where you just don’t even know what genre it is. This book messed with my brain so much.” Read more...
Mary Robinette Kowal, Novelist
Magic Bites
by Ilona Andrews
Magic Bites is the first book in the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews
“It’s urban fantasy, but it isn’t secret magic, where everyone has to keep the magic hidden. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of Atlanta, which is where I live now. These books are set in a contemporary world, but one where magic suddenly came back into this world of technology after thousands of years of being dormant. There was a cataclysmic event, and society crumbled and then recovered. Technology still exists, but it alternates with magic, in waves. One will work and the other won’t. That’s a fun complication. People have learned to live with the mess that this causes. A car may have two engines: a gas engine and a magic engine, or some people ride horses instead because they don’t want to have to deal with it. Compared to our world, it’s more dangerous because you have shapeshifters, vampires controlled by necromancers, mages, witches, and monsters. The monsters range from low-key nuisances to the extremely nasty, people-eating kind.” Read more...
The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples
Valerie Valdes, Novelist
“For me, this is the best of Gaiman’s books and I’ve got all of them. It’s set in the present time and talks about settlers who have settled a continent and have brought their gods with them. So, if you are Swedish and you cherish Nordic gods and move to the US, the gods go with you and the more you believe in them the stronger they are. But if fewer people start believing in them then they get weaker and eventually they become mortal and die. So, it’s about all these forgotten gods. It’s a horror story in which nobody dies. It’s a metaphor for our society – if you replace gods with values then you get the same thing.” Read more...
The best books on How to Win Elections
Marko Rakar, Political Commentator
Rosemary and Rue
by Seanan McGuire
Rosemary and Rue is the first book in the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire
“I defy anyone to read those opening pages…and not have it slightly get under their skin and haunt them…I believe that there’s been a lot of dispute about whether Mikhail Bulgakov was writing against Soviet atheism or in favour of it, against religion or in favour of it. Like all great art, it’s shot through with ambivalence. But I don’t think he could ever have written this other than through the collision of the creative impulse and the soulless worldview of Soviet communism. I just don’t think it would have been created other than through that rather disfiguring collision between creativity and conformity. And, for that reason alone, I just think it’s an astonishing book.” Read more...
Nick Clegg on his Favourite Books
Nick Clegg, Politician
“Jim Hines is absolutely fantastic. He has not mostly written in urban fantasy—he started out with a pure fantasy world, and he is currently writing a science fiction world, I believe. But the Magic Ex Libris series is about Libriomancers—Isaac Vainio, to be specific. He can use magic to pull objects out of books—whatever he wants, as long as it hasn’t already been pulled out, which is the limiting factor. It’s just such an innovative form of magic.” Read more...
Seanan McGuire, Novelist
The Best Urban Fantasy Books, recommended by Seanan McGuire
We tell ourselves fantastical stories to account for all that cannot be explained, says Seanan McGuire, the multi-award winning author of the October Daye, InCryptid, and Indexing series. Here, she selects five of the best urban fantasy books—fabulous novels that help us find the magical in the mundane.
