I've had a look but can't find any threads on this, which I find surprising! A good proportion of the maps posted here seem to be for fantasy worlds, and I'm expecting there to be a load of people here who would have read (or perhaps even written) a lot of fantasy - so does anyone have any recommendations? Most of my life I've read more sci-fi than fantasy, but after finding a few series that I've loved I'm leaning more towards fantasy at the moment - hence wanting to find out about good series.

My personal tastes in books are that at the very least they should be set in a well worked out, internally consistent world, with engaging and realistic characters who drive an interesting story. I'm wavering between Liveship Traders and Mistborn as my favourite fantasy series, though I've only read about half a dozen others. Liveship Traders hits the spot because it has such complex and well rounded characters, each with their own story weaving in and out of each other's influence and culminates in a huge climax at the end. Mistborn does because it's incredibly well structured with an amazing level of subtle foreshadowing, and has a great story arc both within each of the three books and as an overall trilogy - there were times when a revelation in those books forced me to go back and re-read certain sections of previous chapters and books because the new knowledge completely flipped my assumptions about what was happening, which doesn't happen often.

I guess the most obvious thing common to both is that no one character is actually evil - they're all just doing whatever seems right to them, even the completely evil overlord in the first Mistborn book. In that sense they remind me of James Clavell's books, both in terms of character realism and story complexity.

So, does anyone have anything to recommend?


Side note: if anyone has a Goodreads account, they're welcome to add me here