There is a particular kind of reader the Wheel of Time makes. You can identify them at parties by the faraway look in their eyes when someone casually mentions “a long series.” You can spot them in bookstores, instinctively reaching for the thickest spine on the shelf. I became one of them somewhere around book three of Robert Jordan’s saga, when I realized I had stopped reading for the plot and started reading simply to be inside that world, the way one inhabits a foreign country.
What Robert Jordan built across fourteen volumes and more than 4.4 million words is one of the most ambitious acts of literary construction in modern genre fiction. The complete text runs to nearly twelve thousand pages. Each of its books debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, with every volume from the eighth onward landing at number one. Over one hundred million copies have sold worldwide. When Tom Doherty at Tor Books received the manuscript for The Eye of the World, he reportedly sent free review copies to every bookstore in the United States, declaring it would be the biggest fantasy series since Tolkien. He was not wrong.
The series rewired my understanding of what a novel could carry. Epic scope, yes. Elaborate magic tethered to metaphysical principle. A cast of characters so densely realized that readers have mapped their cultural customs, naming conventions, and fashion choices with the precision of anthropologists. But beneath all that architecture is something quieter and harder to name: a profound investment in the moral weight of ordinary people thrust into impossible circumstances. Jordan’s farm boys do not merely become heroes. They are worn into heroism, often against their will, and the series never lets them off the hook for the cost of it.
When the series ended in 2013 with Brandon Sanderson completing the final volumes from Jordan’s meticulous notes, readers faced the oldest and cruelest problem in literary fandom: what do you read next? That question is what this list attempts to answer, not with a random aggregation of “epic fantasy novels,” but with a carefully considered map of the reading experience itself. I have organized these twenty books by the specific quality of the Wheel of Time they most powerfully evoke, so you can find not just a good book, but the right next book for where you are as a reader.
For Readers Who Want to Be Buried Alive in a World
These are the readers who never actually wanted the Wheel of Time to end. They were not merely reading a story; they were emigrating. The worldbuilding was the point. The intricate geopolitics, the dozen distinct cultures with their own dress codes and idioms and blind spots, the sense that the world existed laterally, stretching outward far beyond the borders of any single chapter. These books understand that impulse.
Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book 1)
I want to be honest with you upfront: the first hundred pages of Gardens of the Moon are among the most demanding in popular fantasy literature. Erikson drops you into a world already in motion, already scarred by decades of war and sorcery and political machination, with no map of what you do not yet know. It is not a soft entry point. But if you push through that initial turbulence, you will find a series that matches the Wheel of Time in scope and, in certain respects, exceeds it in ambition.
Where Jordan’s world privileges destiny, Erikson’s is organized around contingency and chaos. The Malazan Empire wages wars across continents, and the gods themselves are implicated in the carnage. The magic system, based on Warrens, feels genuinely alien in the best way. The series spans ten primary novels and over three million words, making it the closest structural equivalent to Jordan’s saga in the entire genre. What I find most striking is Erikson’s refusal to comfort. Characters you have invested in across multiple volumes die without ceremony. Victories are almost immediately revealed to be partial. The books carry the moral weight of actual history, which is to say: heavy, unresolved, and worth bearing.
If the scope and cultural density of the Wheel of Time was your entry drug, Malazan is the inevitable next step.
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive, Book 1)
Sanderson is perhaps the most logical recommendation on this list given his direct role in completing the Wheel of Time after Jordan’s death in 2007. But I would resist the temptation to frame The Stormlight Archive merely as Sanderson-flavored Jordan. It is its own extraordinary thing.
The world of Roshar is battered by highstorms, cataclysmic weather events that have shaped not just the geography but the biology, architecture, philosophy, and social organization of every culture within it. The multiple POV structure is Jordanian in its scope, following a soldier, a scholar, and a highprince’s ward across a world on the edge of apocalypse. Where Sanderson’s work diverges from Jordan is in its relationship to information. Sanderson is a more transparent architect: he shows you the gears of his magic systems with a kind of delighted precision, whereas Jordan preferred the mystery of things half-revealed.
The Way of Kings is currently five volumes into a planned ten-book series, which means committing to it is a meaningful act of faith. I think it is faith well placed.
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1)
I am aware that recommending Martin at this point carries the risk of stating the obvious, but I think it is worth arguing for it specifically, rather than reflexively. A Song of Ice and Fire and the Wheel of Time were published in the same era and represent opposing theories of what epic fantasy should do. Jordan believed in the ultimate ascendance of good. Martin believes in something more like gravity: what goes up tends, eventually, to come down hard.
The multi-POV structure, the deeply imagined world with its own internal history, the large ensemble of morally complex characters, the sense that politics and power are as dangerous as any dark lord: these are qualities both series share. What Martin adds, and Jordan largely resists, is a conviction that power corrupts in concrete and consequential ways. The series remains unfinished, which is a real consideration. But the five existing volumes represent some of the most formidably realized epic fantasy prose of the past three decades.
Magician by Raymond E. Feist (The Riftwar Saga, Book 1)
Before Jordan, before Martin, there was Feist. Magician, published in 1982, established many of the conventions that Jordan would later refine and expand, including the young boy of mysterious potential, the mentor figure with hidden knowledge, and the world-altering conflict that begins in a quiet provincial corner of civilization. Reading Feist after Jordan is an interesting inversion of the usual chronology, but I find it clarifying.
Feist’s prose is leaner, more propulsive, less architecturally dense than Jordan’s. The Riftwar Saga is more accessible and covers its narrative ground more efficiently. But Magician has a quality of genuine wonder that I think Jordan readers will recognize immediately: the sense that the world is vast in ways the protagonist does not yet comprehend, and that the reader’s own expanding understanding of it is itself a source of pleasure. As a gateway to the Riftwar Cycle’s broader universe, it is also a commitment; Feist wrote in that world for over thirty years.
For Readers Who Believe Fate Is a Character
The Wheel of Time takes prophecy seriously as a narrative engine. Rand al’Thor’s destiny is not incidental to the story; it is the story. The weight of being foreseen, of knowing that the pattern of the universe has already sketched your role, saturates the series with a particular kind of tragic grandeur. These readers are drawn to books where fate operates as something closer to a presence than a plot device.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 1)
Rothfuss built a novel of extravagant literary confidence. Kvothe narrates his own legend from the vantage of someone who has already become a myth, already passed through fame and into obscurity, and the distance between the story he is telling and the ruin he has become charges every chapter with melancholy. It is a trick of structure that Jordan never attempted, and it gives the Kingkiller Chronicle a quality of retrospective doom that I find genuinely haunting.
The magic of sympathy, Rothfuss’s alternative to the One Power, is rigorously logical and anchored in the physical world, requiring the magician to maintain a divided consciousness while performing it. The University sequences, in which Kvothe studies under masters who range from brilliant to sadistic, are some of the most satisfying passages of apprenticeship in the genre. The great caveat, of course, is the series remains unfinished. The third volume has been in progress for well over a decade. Some readers prefer to wait. I prefer to read the first two and accept that certain stories are still in progress.
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
This trilogy, beginning with The Dragonbone Chair in 1988, is in many ways the direct antecedent to both the Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin has said openly that Williams’s work influenced him. Jordan’s own decision to write in the high fantasy tradition almost certainly passed through Williams’s shadow.
The story follows Simon, a kitchen boy in a great castle, drawn by catastrophe into a world of ancient prophecy, storm kings, and warring political factions. What distinguishes Williams from his contemporaries is his investment in the subjective experience of characters confronting a world that exceeds their comprehension. Simon does not understand most of what is happening around him for much of the trilogy, and neither does the reader, and that shared incomprehension becomes a kind of intimacy. The prose is lush without being ornate, and the trilogy’s ending earns its emotional weight in ways that feel carefully prepared rather than manufactured.
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind (The Sword of Truth, Book 1)
Wizard’s First Rule is, in terms of pure surface resemblance, probably the most immediately recognizable Wheel of Time analogue on this list. Young man of hidden significance, mysterious older guide, a world shaped by ancient conflict between good and evil, and a magic system with firm rules and high consequences. Goodkind writes with a directness that Jordan does not always share, and the series has real momentum.
I should be transparent about my ambivalence here: the later volumes of The Sword of Truth become increasingly didactic, advancing a philosophical position with a certainty that I find more interesting to argue with than to accept. But the first book, taken on its own terms, is a genuinely propulsive fantasy novel with a protagonist who earns his development. For readers whose primary appetite is for the chosen-one arc done with conviction and pace, it delivers.
For Readers Who Want Their Idealism Actively Dismantled
The Wheel of Time is, at its core, a hopeful series. Light endures. Characters suffer, sometimes catastrophically, but the moral architecture is not in question. Some readers complete the series hungry for a fantasy world that operates without that reassurance. These books oblige them.
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (The First Law, Book 1)
Abercrombie occupies a specific position in the fantasy landscape: he is the most rigorous interrogator of the genre’s own assumptions currently working. The Blade Itself assembles a cast of characters who would, in a more conventional fantasy novel, be the hero, the mentor, and the berserker, and then systematically examines the psychological and moral wreckage that their archetypes actually require. The barbarian is traumatized. The wizard is manipulative and ancient in his cruelties. The noble protagonist discovers, gradually, that his idealism has been both his virtue and his weapon.
The world of the First Law is one on the edge of an industrial revolution, and the series understands that revolutions, even good ones, do not produce clean outcomes. Abercrombie is not nihilistic; he is precise. The distinction matters. His characters have genuine interiority, genuine capacity for change, and the series rewards sustained engagement in ways that pure nihilism cannot. For readers who found the Wheel of Time‘s moral certainty eventually constraining, the First Law trilogy is a bracing corrective.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (Gentleman Bastard, Book 1)
This is a somewhat sideways recommendation, in that Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard sequence is not epic fantasy in the sprawling, continent-spanning sense that Jordan is. It is a heist novel set in a deeply imagined quasi-Renaissance city built on the ruins of an ancient alien civilization. But I include it because of a quality it shares with the Wheel of Time that is harder to name than worldbuilding or magic systems: the pleasure of competence.
Jordan’s characters, particularly Mat Cauthon, derive much of their appeal from their tactical intelligence and accumulated skill. Lynch gives us Locke Lamora, a con man of exceptional gifts operating inside a world of criminal politics, and the books are powered by the same engine: watching a smart person navigate a world that keeps outpacing them. The writing is sharp, occasionally very funny, and the emotional stakes are higher than the heist premise suggests. These are books about loyalty, grief, and the cost of choosing one’s family.
The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker (The Second Apocalypse, Book 1)
Bakker is the most demanding writer on this list, and I offer this recommendation with full awareness that it is not for everyone. The Darkness That Comes Before opens a sequence that is philosophically dense, morally confrontational, and built around a magic system rooted in metaphysical determinism, the idea that consciousness itself can be made into a weapon if you understand its mechanisms completely.
The epic scope is unquestionably Jordanian: a holy war, a world of warring factions, ancient sorcerers, and a threat that exceeds human comprehension. But Bakker’s universe operates by a brutal logic. Characters who are not self-aware are manipulated by those who are, and the series relentlessly examines the question of whether free will exists in a world where behavior can be predicted and controlled. For readers who want the density of the Wheel of Time filtered through the philosophical seriousness of serious literary fiction, Bakker’s work is extraordinary and permanently unsettling.
For Readers Who Read for Character Above Everything
These are the readers who stayed in the Wheel of Time not because of the battle at Dumai’s Wells or the Forsaken’s schemes, but because they needed to know what Nynaeve’s face looked like when she finally let go. Character psychology, intimate emotional development, the private interior life of people navigating extraordinary circumstances: this is what matters to them.
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb (The Farseer Trilogy, Book 1)
If I had to choose a single book from this entire list as the closest spiritual companion to the Wheel of Time in terms of emotional investment, it would be Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice. The novel introduces FitzChivalry Farseer, a royal bastard raised in the castle kitchens, trained as an assassin, and burdened with a magic he must keep secret. It is a novel about the experience of growing up in an institution that does not fully claim you, which is not a bad description of what Rand al’Thor endures across fourteen volumes.
Hobb’s prose is patient in the way that Jordan’s is patient: willing to spend time in a moment, to track the emotional ripple of a conversation across chapters. The Elderlings series, which grows from this trilogy, spans fifteen books and, crucially, improves as it expands. That is a rare achievement. The later volumes are among the most emotionally grueling fantasy novels I have ever read, in the best possible sense. Hobb asks readers to love characters and then watches what that love costs them.
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
Carey’s debut novel is, on its surface, an unlikely Wheel of Time companion: the narrative is set in an alternate medieval Europe, is explicitly erotic, and is narrated by a courtesan who is also a spy. But the qualities that make it remarkable are precisely the qualities Jordan readers will recognize. The world is built with extraordinary density, including its own religion, its own political factions, its own history of conquest and resistance. The protagonist, Phèdre no Delaunay, is a woman whose unusual nature renders her simultaneously exceptional and vulnerable, and the novel’s epic scope unfolds through her individual perspective with great formal control.
What Kushiel’s Dart shares with the Wheel of Time at the deepest level is its commitment to the idea that power, in all its forms, requires sacrifice, and that the people who exercise it must understand what they are giving up. The prose is among the most deliberately beautiful in contemporary fantasy. This is a novel that trusts its readers to inhabit an unfamiliar moral landscape without a guide.
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
Kay is the most literary fantasy novelist working in the English language, and Tigana is, in my estimation, his masterwork. It concerns a land whose name has been magically erased from human memory as an act of conquest, so that only those born there can remember what their country was called. It is about identity under occupation, about what it means to preserve culture against a power that has literally excised your past.
The political complexity and emotional depth here rival anything Jordan achieved. Kay’s prose operates at a different register, denser and more oblique, influenced by his work as Christopher Tolkien’s assistant on the Silmarillion. Tigana is a standalone novel, a format Jordan readers may find disorienting after their immersion in series fiction, but its self-containment is part of its argument. Some stories, Kay suggests, should be allowed to end.
For Readers Who Love Magic as Intellectual Architecture
The One Power in the Wheel of Time is not decoration. It has rules. It has gender divisions with profound consequences. It has a taint. The magic system is a worldbuilding argument, not merely a narrative convenience. These readers want their next series to take magic as seriously as Jordan did.
The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, Book 1)
Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy is where his reputation as the genre’s preeminent magic system designer was established. Allomancy, the magic of The Final Empire, requires its practitioners to swallow and “burn” specific metals to gain specific abilities. The system is elegant, internally consistent, and built out in extraordinary detail across the trilogy. Unlike Jordan’s magic, which retains an element of mysticism, Sanderson’s is almost Newtonian in its transparency.
The Final Empire is also the novel that convinced Harriet McDougal Rigney that Sanderson was the right person to complete the Wheel of Time. She read the Mistborn trilogy and recognized in it the qualities of structural control and character investment that Jordan’s unfinished work required. That endorsement means something. The novel is set in a world where the prophesied hero failed, which gives the entire enterprise a corrective quality: what do you build when the chosen one was defeated?
The Black Prism by Brent Weeks (Lightbringer, Book 1)
Weeks built one of the most original magic systems in contemporary fantasy: chromaturgy, a power derived from drafting light of specific colors, with each color producing different materials and conferring different psychological states on its user. The system is visual, inventive, and deeply integrated into the social and political organization of the world. Those who can draft are ranked by what colors they can access, and the character who can draft all colors, the Prism, is both the most powerful individual in the world and the most constrained by it.
The series has the epic scale, the multiple POV structure, and the long-arc plotting that Wheel of Time readers expect. Weeks also has a genuine gift for reveals, for the moment when the architecture of a long-running secret becomes visible and the reader understands that they have been seeing it all along. The five-volume series is complete, which I mention because completion is a form of respect for the reader’s time.
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
Kuang’s debut novel is the darkest entry on this list and the one that most aggressively refuses the consolations of the genre. Set in a world inspired by twentieth-century Chinese history, particularly the Second Sino-Japanese War, it follows Rin, a war orphan who earns a place at an elite military academy and discovers she can access the power of the gods. The magic, rooted in shamanism and deeply destabilizing to its users, is treated with genuine horror: the power is real, and so is its cost.
What connects The Poppy War to the Wheel of Time at a structural level is Jordan’s own understanding that power corrupts not abstractly but specifically. Rand al’Thor’s slow deterioration under the burden of saidin is one of the great slow-burn tragedies of the series. Kuang accelerates that trajectory and makes it the explicit subject of her trilogy. The series is complete at three volumes, and the second and third books are even more formally ambitious than the first.
For Readers Hungry for Worlds Beyond the European Default
The Wheel of Time, for all its cultural range, draws its primary visual and mythological vocabulary from a broadly European tradition. A significant number of readers who loved Jordan’s world have found themselves wanting more: epic fantasy with the same structural ambition applied to different cultural inheritances. These four novels represent some of the finest recent work in that direction.
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Roanhorse’s Black Sun is a pre-Columbian America-inspired epic set in a world of tidal cities, corvid gods, and ancient prophecy converging on a single day. The novel follows three POV characters toward an inevitable collision: Serapio, whose body has been prepared since childhood as a vessel for the Crow God reborn; Xiala, a disgraced sea captain with a voice that commands water; and Naranpa, the new Sun Priest navigating an institution riddled with treachery.
The structural DNA here is clearly Jordanian. Converging prophecies. An ensemble cast with distinct, carefully differentiated interior lives. A magic system embedded in the theological fabric of the world. What Roanhorse does that Jordan could not, writing in the 1990s, is center an epic narrative entirely outside the Western European imagination. The result feels simultaneously ancient and modern, as though she has recovered a strand of myth that was always there but required this particular writer to articulate it. The trilogy’s second volume, Fevered Star, confirms that the scope is expanding in exactly the right directions.
The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter
Winter’s debut novel is set in a world with clear Xhosa and Zulu cultural influences, following Tau Tafari, a young soldier of low caste who commits himself to becoming the most dangerous fighter his people have ever produced. The context is an endless war for survival against a supernatural enemy, and the magic, which allows certain warriors to draw power from demonic entities at the cost of their sanity, carries echoes of Jordan’s taint on saidin.
The comparison to Jordan is instructive in another sense: both authors understand that the weight of institutional constraint on individual characters is itself a dramatic engine. Tau’s caste is not a backdrop; it is a set of forces that shape every choice he makes. The world is not merely different-looking; it operates by different rules, with different assumptions about honor, sacrifice, and what a hero is permitted to want.
The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart
Stewart’s debut, the first volume of the Drowning Empire trilogy, builds its world around a genuinely original premise: an empire powered by bone shards carved from its citizens’ skulls, which fuel the constructs that serve as the imperial military and spy network. The magic is simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, and the bureaucratic logic of how it operates reveals the specific violence at the heart of the imperial project.
The multi-POV structure, the intricate political worldbuilding, and the long-arc mystery at the center of the narrative are all qualities that Wheel of Time readers will find familiar. What distinguishes The Bone Shard Daughter from its more celebrated contemporaries is the quality of its restraint: Stewart trusts the architecture to do the work, and the emotional revelations land with considerable force precisely because they are not telegraphed.
The Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne
Gwynne’s Bloodsworn Saga, beginning with The Shadow of the Gods, applies the structural ambitions of Nordic mythological epic fantasy to a post-Ragnarok world where the gods are dead but their blood still runs in certain human veins, conferring volatile and dangerous power. The world is brutal, beautiful, and built on a clear-eyed understanding of how violence organizes societies.
The three POV characters traverse a world rearranging itself in the aftermath of divine catastrophe, and the series has the slow-burn convergence of the Wheel of Time at its best: separate stories that feel complete in themselves, gradually revealing their connection to a larger pattern. Gwynne is also one of the finest writers of action sequences in the genre, and for readers who felt the Wheel of Time‘s battles could sometimes feel distant and abstract, The Shadow of the Gods offers something far more viscerally immediate.
A Final Reflection
Reading the Wheel of Time changes what you expect from fiction. It raises your baseline. After inhabiting a world of that density and duration, lesser books can feel thin, their stakes unconvincing, their characters insufficiently lived-in. The twenty books on this list are, in my judgment, the ones that will not disappoint you in that way.
They are not Wheel of Time substitutes. Nothing is. But each of them takes the reading experience seriously in the way that Jordan took it seriously: as a commitment, a contract, a genuine act of world-construction undertaken with the assumption that the reader deserves a full universe, not merely a backdrop. Some of them are darker. Some are leaner. Some prioritize different virtues.
“There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
Jordan wrote that sentence at the opening of The Eye of the World, and it is one of the best opening sentences in the genre because it captures something true about the experience of reading itself. Every good book is a beginning, even when it is also an ending. These twenty books are beginnings. I encourage you to find out where they take you.