Books like The Will of the Many — picked by fans

I fell in love with epic fantasy because of this book's incredible magic system and heist structure.

I was captivated by Kelsier and Vin, two deeply flawed survivors using stealth, strategy, and street smarts to challenge an immortal god king. I loved how Allomancy felt like a physical science, where push-and-pull forces dictated every combat encounter.

The academy of thief crews and rebellion planning kept me hooked on every page. It taught me how powerful a story can be when magic has strict rules and real physical consequences.

I lost sleep listening to this book because the narrative momentum is an absolute freight train.

Darrow's journey of infiltrating the Institute under an assumed identity pulled me in instantly, and his relentless grief and fury felt remarkably grounded. I loved the ruthless tactical games, the shifting house alliances, and the constant threat of betrayal around every corner.

Pierce Brown created a brutal pressure cooker where survival requires intellect as much as martial prowess. It remains one of my favorite stories about a protagonist driven by vengeance against an oppressive empire.

I was deeply moved by Rin's relentless struggle to earn a spot at Sinegard, the elite military academy.

I loved how the story started with rigorous academic and martial testing before plunging into the grim realities of war. The shamanic magic system felt wild, dangerous, and atmospheric. I resonated with Rin's fierce determination as an outsider forced to prove herself among privilege and political intrigue.

R. F. Kuang created an uncompromising, emotionally heavy narrative that shows the true, brutal cost of power and vengeance.

I am in awe of this book! I think it’s close to perfect, if not perfect. The detective here is Meyer Landsman, who “only has two moods: working and dead.” The novel is set in an alternate history that imagines Sitka, Alaska as a sprawling, Yiddish-speaking metropolis where all the Jews have fled after World War II.

The dead body is a mysterious young drug addict with connections to Sitka’s seedy underbelly. The story is a page-turner, but the sentences are truly incredible. It’s also very funny. I keep returning to this book year after year and every time it blows me away.

What if we could detect psychopaths? Like many of Sawyer’s novels (and there are a bunch I could’ve selected for this list), there is a question and then a lightning strike of answers. Not a single bolt, but many, branching off, colliding, bleaching the night. There is plenty of scientific realism here–a personal must for Sawyer–resulting in a far-reaching yet intimate story.

The title is not ‘Night of the Psychopaths’ because the book’s many forks take us deeper into the nature of the human mind and the quantum arena we all play in, whether we know it or not. Oh, and it is still fun, adventuresome, and easier to read than I may have made it sound with all that deep, introspective stuff.

I was blown away by the scale, intensity, and singular obsession of Tau's journey.

I loved that the protagonist is not naturally gifted with magic or combat divinity; instead, he earns every single drop of his lethal skill through agonizing, repetitive sacrifice. The military training sequences felt raw, exhausting, and fiercely authentic.

I found myself cheering out loud during the sparring trials because the stakes felt so intimately personal. It is one of the most visceral, adrenaline-fueled military fantasy novels I have ever experienced.

What if extinctions could be traded like carbon? There’s an idea that doesn’t come up too often over dinner. It’s odd, awful, and yet somewhat plausible, as our hyper-capitalistic world keeps thinking it can buy its way out of physics.

Beauman chooses not to hash out the details in the Journal of Political Economy. He chooses to have it read instead. As you should, because I found the novel that fully examines this terrible concept to be terribly interesting, terribly inventive, and terribly funny. Not in a LOL kind of funny (though there are moments) but in the smirking, wry, ‘of course’ realm of humor ruled by the line of succession that runs from Jonathan Swift to George Carlin.

I love jokes that last long enough for you to realize they were so much more than whimsy. 

What if elevator inspectors had their own influential guild? Not science fiction, not fantasy, and not even alternative history. Just a riveting, delightful, challenging ‘what if’ that does not fit in a box. In a shaft. In a skyscraper. When I first heard about this book, I thought elevator inspection might be, let’s say, resistant to novel-sized interrogation.

To this, I now say, behold the umbrella that fits in the purse or the king-sized mattress that arrives in a toddler-sized box. This book unfolds and puffs up deliberately and warmly, and eventually, you find yourself curled up, reading about the very nature of thought. In a person. In a society. You don’t want to turn out the light and stop. 

In Grey, Gabrian doesn’t believe in magic. She’s a psychologist, and proud to be one. She bases her life on logic, but when things start to happen that she can’t explain, she finds herself in a whirlwind of magic. The way that Gabrian slowly comes to the truth is probably my favorite part of this book. As a Borrower, she’s considered not just a magical being, but a dangerous one. At first, she doesn’t handle this well and takes on the role of an anti-hero, nearly villain which was an interesting way to not only build Gabrian’s character but to introduce the truth of the magical world as well.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a fantastic tale of two worlds. There is the Land, a mystical place of good versus evil, with inhabitants who use supernatural means to summon help against the darkness, and our world where the writer Thomas Covenant lives as an outcast to keep his leprosy in remission and to avoid his hostile neighbors. When he is magically transported to the Land and its people beg him to fight the evil for them, he refuses, believing it is a suicidal delusion that will reactivate his disease and kill him. The troubled hero Covenant could not be more compelling, or his dilemma better written, especially as the true-blue inhabitants of the Land struggle to understand why he can’t do the right thing.