Best urban fantasy novels
Magic running underneath a real city, usually knowing more than you do.
Ranked by how often each title comes up across 4 reading lists on NextBook — not by our opinion of them.
1 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
Rothfuss takes magic seriously as a course of study — tuition, lab work, sleepless nights — and hands you a gifted, insufferable narrator to spend it with.
2 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
Magic as discipline and cost rather than wonder, two students bound to a competition neither chose, and an atmosphere thick enough to lie down in.
3 of 12recommended on 2 listsA Darker Shade of Magic
V.E. Schwab
Parallel Londons, a magician who can walk between them, and a magic system with rules strict enough to hurt. Cleaner and more fun than Grossman, deliberately so.
4 of 12recommended on 2 listsCity of Bones
Cassandra Clare
Here because it fills the same shelf — a teenager discovering a hidden magical society — but it plays every beat straight that Grossman goes out of his way to undercut.
5 of 12recommended on 2 listsJonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Susanna Clarke
Magic restored to England by two men who mostly quarrel about procedure, footnotes included. The scholarly, disenchanted approach Grossman clearly enjoys.
6 of 12recommended on 2 listsSix of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
The other great YA friend group, written with the same care: six people whose loyalties are the actual plot, and a heist arranged around them.
7 of 12recommended on 2 listsThe Lies of Locke Lamora
Scott Lynch
Clever, damaged young people trained in a hard discipline, running on banter right up until the consequences arrive and stop being funny.
8 of 12recommended on 2 listsThe Magicians
Lev Grossman
An ordinary, faintly hopeless young man discovers the magic is real and immediately finds it does not fix him. Gaiman's premise with the whimsy scraped off.
9 of 12A Court of Thorns and Roses
Sarah J. Maas
The series most Mortal Instruments readers graduate to: the same appetite for beautiful dangerous men and a heroine remade, with the heat turned right up.
10 of 12American Gods
Neil Gaiman
A man drifting through a magical America he cannot quite feel anything about. Gaiman shares Grossman's flat affect and his suspicion that the numinous disappoints.
11 of 12Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Laini Taylor
Taylor writes the same kind of sentence Stiefvater does — strange, sensuous, slightly too much — and builds a doomed romance on a secret nobody can change.
12 of 12Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
J.K. Rowling
The book Grossman argues with on every page. Worth rereading afterwards, if only to see how much of the shape he kept while removing all the comfort.
Start from one you already loved
A genre is a blunt instrument. Pick the urban fantasy book you actually liked and we’ll rank the next one by what you liked about it.
- Books like The MagiciansLev Grossman
- Books like NeverwhereNeil Gaiman
- Books like The Raven BoysMaggie Stiefvater
- Books like The Mortal InstrumentsCassandra Clare
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