Malazan Book of the Fallen

About the Malazan Book of the Fallen series

The Malazan Empire has spent a century conquering a continent through sorcery, siege warfare and the ascension of its soldiers to godhood, and the empire's oldest, most battle-worn armies are starting to wonder whether the throne they fight for still deserves their loyalty. Steven Erikson opens Gardens of the Moon in the middle of an already-vast, already-old world, with no orientation and no apology, and asks readers to catch up — gods walk among mortals and scheme like politicians, ten-thousand-year-old empires leave ruins that are still dangerous, and entire cultures of Elder Races carry grudges older than most fantasy settings' entire histories.

Built from a shared world Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont developed together as a tabletop role-playing campaign, the ten-book main sequence is famous for its scale: dozens of point-of-view characters, multiple simultaneous continents and wars, a deep and often withheld magic system, and a philosophical preoccupation with compassion, complicity and the cost of empire that sits underneath all the battles. It demands real patience and a willingness to be confused for a few hundred pages at a time — but it's regularly cited as one of the most ambitious and rewarding epic fantasy sagas ever completed, for readers who want scale that actually earns the word "epic."

How to read this series

Read the ten main-sequence novels in publication order, starting with Gardens of the Moon — this is one continuous story (with converging plotlines rather than a single protagonist) and there's no separate chronological order to weigh. Be prepared for a genuinely difficult first book: Erikson drops readers into the world with almost no exposition, and many longtime fans admit Gardens of the Moon is the hardest entry to get through. It gets more legible, not less ambitious, from Deadhouse Gates onward.

Co-creator Ian Cameron Esslemont wrote a parallel six-book series, the Novels of the Malazan Empire, set in the same world and often recommended interleaved with Erikson's main sequence for readers who want the fullest possible picture; it isn't covered on this page. Erikson has also written prequel trilogies (Kharkanas, and Path to Ascendancy) and a set of darkly comic Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas in the same setting — none are required before starting Gardens of the Moon, and most readers save them for after finishing the main ten books.