Books

261 books

Books are where stories come alive. OpenFiction catalogues novels, novellas, graphic novels, manga volumes, anthologies, and more - each broken down into chapters and segments so you can track exactly where characters appear and how their stories unfold. Every book page shows you the characters who appear, organised by chapter. See when a character first shows up, track their journey through the narrative, and understand relationships as they develop. For books in a series, we show you where it fits in the reading order and how it connects to the larger story. Whether you're avoiding spoilers for a first read or refreshing your memory before a new release, our detailed chapter-by-chapter breakdowns help you find exactly what you need without ruining surprises.

Abaddon's Gate
by James S. A. Corey
The protomolecule has built a massive ring structure beyond the orbit of Uranus and humanity has sent a fleet to investigate. Holden and the Rocinante are there, and so is a church pastor, a security officer, and a Martian marine with unfinished business. When the ring activates and traps the fleet in an alien space, the danger is less the unknown technology than the humans trapped alongside it. Closes the first act of the series and opens the door to everything that follows.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

The first and most celebrated short story collection, gathering twelve stories that had appeared in The Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1892 and made Holmes a cultural phenomenon. The collection opens with A Scandal in Bohemia, introducing Irene Adler, and includes The Red-Headed League, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, and The Adventure of the Speckled Band - among the most ingeniously plotted and widely anthologised stories in the canon. The Adventures established the template for the Holmes short story at its sharpest, and Doyle's invention within the form across twelve consecutive cases has rarely been matched. Critical and popular reception was exceptional, cementing Holmes as the dominant fictional figure in British popular culture.

Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

Sharrow is a former aristocrat in the Golter system - an isolated civilisation cut off from the rest of the galaxy - and someone wants her dead. The Huhsz, a fanatical religious cult, have been granted a legal warrant for her assassination, and her only hope of survival is to find the Lazy Gun: an ancient, impossibly powerful weapon that is the last of its kind. To find it, Sharrow reassembles her old military team - Miz, Dloan, Zefla, and Cenuij - and embarks on a treasure hunt across a world littered with the ruins of fallen civilisations. Iain M. Banks' darkest science fiction novel, a story about loss, the weight of history, and a woman running out of places to hide.

The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

In the far future, the galaxy is governed by the Mercatoria - a vast bureaucratic authority that controls interstellar travel through its monopoly on wormhole access. When war comes to the remote Ulubis system, scholar Fassin Taak is sent on an urgent mission among the Dwellers - ancient, gas-giant-dwelling beings who have existed for billions of years and may hold the secret to a legendary lost network of wormholes that could reshape the balance of power in the galaxy. Meanwhile, an invasion fleet led by the pirate-king Archimandrite Luseferous bears down on Ulubis, and time is running out. Iain M. Banks' grandest space opera outside the Culture, a novel about deep time, ancient civilisations, and the gap between what we seek and what we find.

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All the Pretty Horses

by Cormac McCarthy

John Grady Cole, sixteen years old and the last in a line of Texas ranchers, rides into Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins when his family's ranch is sold. What begins as an adventure becomes a brutal education in the realities of a world that has no place for the life he wants to live. A coming-of-age story suffused with longing for a vanishing way of life.

Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania

by Brandon Sanderson

Allomancer Jak is the self-proclaimed greatest adventurer in the Elendel Basin, and he wants you to know it. Presented as a serialised collection of letters to his adoring readers - with exasperated footnotes from his long-suffering Terris steward Handerwym correcting his exaggerations at every turn - this tale follows Jak's expedition into the wilds in search of the legendary Survivor's Treasure. Captured by a koloss tribe after killing their champion in what he assures you was a perfectly fair duel, Jak finds himself dragged to a hidden holy site: an enormous natural pool surrounded by ancient stonework. There he discovers that his travelling companion Elizandra Dramali has been concealing her koloss-blooded heritage, and that the tribe intends to make Jak one of their own by driving metal spikes through his body. With his Allomancy restored through an unlikely kiss, Jak dives to the bottom of the pool to retrieve a treasure that can only be "raised by life itself" - and what he finds changes the fortunes of both the tribe and himself. A comedic short story set on Scadrial during the Wax and Wayne era of the Cosmere. Equal parts pulp adventure serial and affectionate parody, best enjoyed with close attention to Handerwym's footnotes, which tell a rather different story than Jak's.

The Alloy of Law

by Brandon Sanderson

Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds. The heroes of the old age have passed into history and into religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice. One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will. After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

by Terry Pratchett

A talking cat, a gang of talking rats, and a stupid-looking kid have a nice racket going - the rats infest a town, the kid plays his pipe, the rats leave, and everyone gets paid. It's the Pied Piper con. Then they arrive in the town of Bad Blintz, where something has already eaten all the real rats, and the game turns dangerous. A Discworld novel for younger readers, darker than it first appears, about stories, sentience, and the moment when being clever stops being enough.

The Amber Spyglass

by Philip Pullman

The concluding volume of His Dark Materials resolves the trilogy's theological and philosophical argument in terms that engage directly with Milton's Paradise Lost, staging a confrontation whose outcome determines the nature of consciousness across all worlds. The novel is the longest and most ambitious of the three, opening up the land of the dead, introducing the Mulefa - wheel-using creatures whose relationship with Dust offers a key to understanding its nature - and giving Mary Malone a part in the resolution that no one but the dark matter physicist could play. The Amber Spyglass is Pullman at his most explicit about his philosophical concerns, and its emotional climax is among the most affecting in contemporary fiction for any age.

Arcanum Unbounded

by Brandon Sanderson

A collection of short fiction and novellas spanning the full breadth of the Cosmere. The nine works gathered here range across six worlds - Sel, Scadrial, Taldain, Threnody, First of the Sun, and Roshar - each with its own distinct magic system and history. Includes The Emperor's Soul, Mistborn: Secret History, Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell, and Edgedancer, a Stormlight Archive novella first published in this volume. Supplemented with charts, illustrations, and in-world notes that expand the connective tissue between Sanderson's linked universe. Essential reading for anyone following the broader Cosmere arc.

Assassin's Apprentice

by Robin Hobb

The opening novel of the Farseer Trilogy introduces FitzChivalry Farseer, the illegitimate son of Prince Chivalry, brought to Buckkeep Castle as a child and raised in the stables before being taken on as a royal assassin's apprentice. Hobb establishes her world and its politics with considerable restraint, allowing the Six Duchies and its court to emerge through Fitz's limited and often uninformed perspective. The novel covers Fitz's childhood and early training, his first encounters with the Skill and the Wit, and his complicated relationship with the enigmatic figure known as the Fool. Quieter in pace than much epic fantasy, it rewards patience with a depth of characterisation rarely attempted in the genre.

Assassin's Fate

by Robin Hobb

The concluding volume of the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy and the final novel of the Realm of the Elderlings is among the longest and most ambitious in the sequence, bringing together threads from across all five trilogies in a conclusion that demanded and rewarded the full investment of the sequence. The journey to Clerres and its resolution draw on the mythology established across twenty years of the Elderlings universe, and the fates of Fitz, the Fool, and Bee are resolved in ways that have generated sustained discussion since publication. Hobb subjects her characters to some of the most extreme treatment in the sequence before reaching a conclusion that is simultaneously devastating and, for many readers, exactly right. Assassin's Fate is the most debated ending in the Elderlings universe and one of the most discussed conclusions in contemporary fantasy fiction.

Assassin's Quest

by Robin Hobb

The concluding volume of the Farseer Trilogy is the longest and most ambitious of the three, sending Fitz on an extended journey that takes him far beyond the Six Duchies in pursuit of a purpose he barely understands. The novel's pace is deliberately gruelling - Hobb uses the length and difficulty of the journey as a formal expression of what the quest costs its protagonist. The conclusion has divided readers since publication, with some finding it among the most affecting endings in fantasy fiction and others finding its particular form of resolution too costly to accept. It is not a comfortable ending but it is an honest one.

Auberon

by James S. A. Corey

One of the first and most important colony worlds through the gates is getting a new governor, sent by the emerging Laconian Empire to bring order to a planet that has developed its own complex culture and economy. A study in imperial administration, local resistance, and the limits of power at a distance. Best read alongside Persepolis Rising.

Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

The Free Navy has shattered the inner planets' supply chains and humanity is starving. Holden and a coalition of desperate allies have to stop a war of attrition they are already losing. The most politically complex novel in the series, told through the largest cast of point-of-view characters, including the enemy. Asks seriously whether the Belt's grievances justify its methods and does not give a clean answer.

The Bands of Mourning

by Brandon Sanderson

The Bands of Mourning are the mythical metalminds owned by the Lord Ruler, said to grant anyone who wears them the full suite of powers he commanded. Most people consider them a legend. Then a kandra researcher returns to Elendel with images that appear to depict the Bands, alongside writings in an unreadable language, and the legend suddenly demands investigation. Waxillium Ladrian is recruited to travel south to the city of New Seran, where the trail leads toward his uncle Edwarn and the shadowy organisation known as The Set. What Wax, Wayne, and Marasi discover there will reshape their understanding of Scadrial's history and its place in the wider Cosmere.

Before They Are Hanged

by Joe Abercrombie

The second novel in the First Law trilogy splits the cast across three campaigns, none of which go as planned. Bayaz leads a small group - including Logen, Jezal, and Ferro Maljinn - west across the edge of the map in search of a weapon from the Age of Heroes. Glokta is sent to hold the besieged city of Dagoska against an overwhelming Gurkish army, with insufficient troops, uncertain loyalties, and the usual bureaucratic obstructions. And West marches north with the Union army to relieve a fortress under siege, discovering that military command bears little resemblance to military theory. Abercrombie's middle volume is where the series' moral complexity fully emerges - characters change, and not necessarily for the better.

Beren and Lúthien

by J. R. R. Tolkien

The epic tale of Beren and Lúthien became an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of Tolkien's First Age of the World. Always key to the story is the fate that shadowed their love: Beren was a mortal man, Lúthien an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, imposed on Beren an impossible task before he might wed Lúthien: to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, of a Silmaril. Painstakingly restored from Tolkien's manuscripts and presented for the first time as a continuous and standalone story, Beren and Lúthien reunites fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, along with the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien's Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien tells the story in his father's own words by giving its original form as well as prose and verse passages from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed.

Best Served Cold

by Joe Abercrombie

A standalone set in the same world as the First Law trilogy, following Monza Murcatto, the most feared mercenary general in Styria, who is thrown from a cliff and left for dead by the Duke she served. She survives. The novel is a revenge story - seven names, seven deaths - structured like a heist, with Monza assembling a crew of specialists as morally compromised as she is. The tone is darker and the setting more Italian-Renaissance than the trilogy, with city-states, condottieri, and political intrigue replacing the North and the Union. One of Abercrombie's tightest constructions.

The Blade Itself

by Joe Abercrombie

The first novel in Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy, and one of the most assured debuts in grimdark fantasy. Three storylines converge on the city of Adua: Logen Ninefingers, a barbarian from the frozen North with a reputation for survival and a darker secret he tries not to examine too closely; Sand dan Glokta, a crippled torturer for the Inquisition who was once the most celebrated swordsman in the Union and now extracts confessions through methods he applies with equal parts professionalism and self-loathing; and Jezal dan Luthar, a vain, lazy nobleman coasting on his looks and his talent with a sword. The wizard Bayaz arrives claiming to be the First of the Magi and sets events in motion that none of them are prepared for. The Blade Itself is largely a novel of introductions, but the characters are so precisely drawn that it barely matters.

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Books

Abaddon's Gate

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Against a Dark Background

The Algebraist

All the Pretty Horses

Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania

The Alloy of Law

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The Amber Spyglass

Arcanum Unbounded

Assassin's Apprentice

Assassin's Fate

Assassin's Quest

Auberon

Babylon's Ashes

The Bands of Mourning

Before They Are Hanged

Beren and Lúthien

Best Served Cold

The Blade Itself