I have spent the better part of three decades reading fantasy fiction, and I can count on one hand the series that fundamentally altered what I expected from the genre. Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher saga is on that hand. Not because it reinvented the wheel, but because it reminded us that the wheel was forged in Slavic myth and sardonic wit long before the Anglophone publishing world decided what fantasy was supposed to look like.
What Sapkowski accomplished, first in a 1986 short story submitted to Fantastyka magazine and eventually across nine books translated into over forty languages with more than thirty million copies sold worldwide, is a body of work that defies easy imitation. The Witcher series is not simply dark fantasy. It is not simply monster-of-the-week adventure. It is a layered, philosophically restless exploration of what happens when you strip the romanticism out of heroism and leave a man standing alone in the muck, making impossible choices that nobody will thank him for. Geralt of Rivia is not a chosen one. He is a mutant. He is a laborer. He is, in the most literal sense, a hired killer of things the rest of society would prefer not to acknowledge.
With the 2025 release of Crossroads of Ravens, Sapkowski’s prequel following a young Geralt fresh out of Kaer Morhen, the series proved it still has teeth. That book debuted as an instant New York Times bestseller, moved over 30,000 copies in Poland within its first three days, and was nominated for the prestigious Janusz A. Zajdel Award. It reminded me, and the entire fantasy readership, that the Witcher universe is not a relic. It is alive.
So what do you read after you have walked the Path with Geralt? That is the question I want to take seriously here. Not with a list of vaguely similar titles thrown at a wall, but with a carefully considered selection of books that share the specific qualities that make The Witcher irreplaceable: moral ambiguity as a structural principle, folklore treated as living tissue rather than decorative wallpaper, combat that costs something, and prose that knows when to cut and when to linger. These are the seventeen books I would hand to anyone who finished Lady of the Lake and felt the particular emptiness of a world you are not ready to leave.
For Readers Who Need Grimdark Political Intrigue and Morally Bankrupt Characters
If the political machinations of Nilfgaard, the cynicism of the Northern Kingdoms, and Sapkowski’s refusal to give his audience clean heroes are what hooked you, these books will feel like coming home to a house that is on fire in the best possible way.
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
Joe Abercrombie has been called Lord Grimdark so often that the nickname has essentially become a second byline. His First Law trilogy, beginning with The Blade Itself, is the book I recommend more than any other to readers who loved The Witcher’s political spine. The cast is a murderer’s row of compromised individuals: Logen Ninefingers, a barbarian who has lost count of his own atrocities; Sand dan Glokta, a torturer who was himself tortured; and Jezal dan Luthar, a nobleman so vain he practically glows with self-regard.
What Abercrombie shares with Sapkowski is an unwillingness to let his characters off the hook. There is no redemption arc that resolves neatly. There is survival, and there is the question of what you are willing to do in order to achieve it. The gallows humor here operates on the same frequency as Geralt’s dry observations about the absurdity of his profession. Abercrombie’s prose is leaner than Sapkowski’s, more percussive, built for momentum. But the philosophical weight is comparable. This is the single most natural next step for any Witcher reader, and I will argue that point with anyone.
Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
If Geralt occasionally made you uncomfortable with his moral flexibility, Jorg Ancrath will make you question why you are rooting for someone at all. Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire trilogy opens with a fourteen-year-old prince leading a band of outlaws through acts of violence that would make most fantasy antiheroes flinch. Jorg is not sympathetic in any conventional sense. He is brilliant, vicious, and shaped by trauma that Lawrence reveals with surgical patience across the trilogy.
What connects this to Sapkowski’s work is the refusal to romanticize violence while simultaneously acknowledging its role in the world these characters inhabit. Lawrence’s prose has a poetic edge that catches you off guard between moments of brutality. The world itself, a far-future Earth that has regressed to a medieval state, adds a layer of conceptual strangeness that Witcher readers will appreciate. Sapkowski never let his readers settle into comfortable genre assumptions. Neither does Lawrence.
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
Where Sapkowski drew from Slavic myth, R.F. Kuang pulls from twentieth-century Chinese history, and the result is one of the most devastating fantasy novels published in the last decade. The Poppy War begins as a military academy story, the kind of narrative structure you think you recognize, and then it detonates. Rin, a war orphan who earns her way into the nation’s most elite institution, discovers shamanic powers that come at a cost Sapkowski would appreciate: gods are real, they are indifferent to human suffering, and accessing their power demands a price that escalates until it swallows everything.
The parallel to Geralt’s experience is not superficial. Both characters are tools forged by institutions that have no real interest in their wellbeing. Both discover that the line between weapon and person is thinner than anyone admits. Kuang’s depiction of war, drawn explicitly from the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanjing, is unflinching in a way that echoes Sapkowski’s own refusal to sanitize the consequences of political ambition. This is not comfort reading. It is essential reading.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
This is the most cerebral book on this list, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Baru Cormorant is a financial prodigy whose homeland has been colonized by the Masquerade, an empire that erases cultures through accounting ledgers and public health mandates rather than swords alone. Her plan is to destroy the empire from within, even if it means becoming the thing she hates.
The connection to The Witcher is thematic rather than aesthetic. Sapkowski was always interested in the machinery of empire, the way power operates through bureaucracy and compromise rather than dramatic confrontation. Dickinson takes that interest and builds an entire novel around it. The emotional devastation here is comparable to the hardest moments in the Witcher saga, those passages where Sapkowski reminded you that political necessity and personal morality occupy different countries. Dickinson’s prose is precise, almost clinical, which makes the moments of emotional rupture land harder.
For Readers Who Want Monster Hunters, Mercenaries, and Swords for Hire
Geralt’s profession is, at its core, a blue-collar job. He kills things that need killing, collects his coin, and moves on. If that working-class fantasy sensibility is what drew you in, these books understand the assignment.
The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman
Christopher Buehlman is one of the most versatile writers working in speculative fiction, a poet, playwright, comedian, and novelist whose range is genuinely startling. The Blacktongue Thief is his entry into full epic fantasy, and it lands with the confidence of someone who has been studying the genre his entire life while also doing something completely different with it. Kinch Na Shannack is a thief with a debt to his guild and a tongue that gets him into trouble that his sword skills barely get him out of.
What Buehlman captures, and what so many Witcher imitators miss, is the texture of life on the road in a dangerous world. The economy of his fictional setting feels lived in. The monsters are inventive and terrifying. The humor is constant but never undermines the stakes. Buehlman won the Bridport Prize in poetry before he ever wrote a novel, and you can feel that discipline in every sentence. He knows exactly how much weight a line of prose can carry and he loads it right to the edge. This is the book I give to people who tell me fantasy prose does not matter.
Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames
I want to be clear about something: Kings of the Wyld is a very different book in tone from The Witcher. It is funnier, warmer, more deliberately absurd. But it is also one of the most honest depictions of what it means to be a professional monster hunter that I have ever encountered in fantasy. The premise is deceptively simple. A retired band of mercenaries, once the most feared monster-slaying crew on the continent, reunites for one last mission. They are old. They are out of shape. They are magnificent.
Eames treats his mercenary band the way rock bands are treated in music journalism, as cultural phenomena, as legends who peaked too soon, as aging bodies carrying young memories. The emotional core here is surprisingly deep. Beneath the humor and the spectacular set pieces, this is a book about fatherhood, about the gap between who you were and who you are, about the cost of the life Geralt lives. Eames was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fantasy with this debut, and he earned it. If The Witcher had a funny bone, it would be this book.
The Red Knight by Miles Cameron
Miles Cameron is the pen name of Christian Cameron, a historical novelist with deep expertise in medieval combat and military history. That expertise is not incidental to The Red Knight. It is the engine of the entire book. A young mercenary captain takes a contract to protect an abbey from creatures emerging from the Wild, and what seems like a routine job escalates into a conflict that spans continents and cosmologies.
Cameron’s combat scenes are the most technically precise I have read in fantasy fiction. The armor feels real. The tactics make sense. The physical consequences of violence are rendered with the kind of specificity that Sapkowski brought to his own fight sequences. Beyond the action, Cameron builds a magic system rooted in something resembling medieval alchemy and philosophy, giving the supernatural elements a weight that genre readers will find refreshing. This is a five-book series with the scope to satisfy anyone who wants to lose themselves for a few hundred hours.
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World series takes place on the Dine (Navajo) reservation after a climate apocalypse has flooded most of the world. Maggie Hoskie is a monster hunter, trained by a figure from Dine legend, and she carries the same bitter, sardonic energy that defines early Geralt. She is good at killing. She is bad at everything else. The monsters she hunts come from Dine mythology rather than Slavic folklore, and Roanhorse renders them with the same respect and complexity that Sapkowski brought to his creatures.
What I admire most about Trail of Lightning is its refusal to treat Indigenous mythology as a catalog of exotic creatures for a white audience’s consumption. These are sacred stories, handled with care and specificity, embedded in a living culture. The parallel to Sapkowski’s use of Polish and Slavic folklore is direct and meaningful. Both writers draw from traditions that the dominant English-language fantasy market has historically ignored, and both prove that these traditions produce richer, stranger, more vital fantasy than the usual Tolkien-derived template.
For Readers Drawn to Eastern European Folklore and the Weight of Myth
Sapkowski’s Poland is all over The Witcher, not as set dressing but as structural DNA. The fairy tales are darker here. The forests are older. The bargains have teeth. If that quality of mythic seriousness is what you are chasing, these three books will satisfy.
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik grew up on Polish fairy tales, and it shows in everything she writes. Spinning Silver is a reimagining of the Rumpelstiltskin story set in a fictional kingdom called Lithvas, which blends elements of Lithuania, Russia, and Poland into a winter landscape that feels like it could neighbor the Northern Kingdoms. Miryem, a Jewish moneylender’s daughter, takes over her father’s failing business and discovers she has a talent for turning silver into gold, a skill that attracts the attention of the Staryk, a race of ice fey whose interest in human affairs is neither benign nor easily refused.
The novel weaves together the voices of three women, each navigating a world where power is transactional and survival depends on understanding the rules of bargains you never agreed to. That is pure Witcher territory. Novik won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel with Spinning Silver and earned Hugo and Nebula nominations for the same book. The prose has the cadence of oral storytelling, almost as though the book is being recited rather than read, and the treatment of Eastern European Jewish experience gives the folklore a specificity that most fantasy misses entirely.
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy opens in medieval Russia, where the old gods of forest and hearth are fading as Christianity tightens its grip on the land. Vasya, a young woman who can see the spirits that her village has begun to forget, is caught between two forms of power, both of which demand her submission and neither of which she is willing to give.
The atmospheric quality of this book is extraordinary. Arden builds a winter so cold and present that you feel it in your hands as you read. The tension between Christian authority and pagan tradition mirrors the cultural friction that runs through The Witcher, where elves remember what humans have forgotten and the monsters are often creatures that the old world left behind. Vasya and Geralt share a fundamental loneliness: they see a reality that others cannot, and that sight isolates them. Arden’s debut was selected as one of the best books of 2017 by several major outlets, and the trilogy that follows is consistently excellent.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
I am giving Novik two entries on this list because she has earned them and because Uprooted and Spinning Silver accomplish different things despite sharing a cultural foundation. Uprooted is set in a valley threatened by a malevolent, corrupted forest called the Wood, where a wizard known as the Dragon takes a young woman from the village every ten years to serve as his companion. Agnieszka, the latest girl chosen, turns out to be a different kind of magic user than the Dragon expects, and the partnership that develops between them, tense, combative, intellectually charged, is one of the finest character dynamics I have read in contemporary fantasy.
Novik won the Nebula Award for Best Novel with Uprooted, which is the kind of credential that speaks for itself. The book’s engagement with Polish folklore is deeply informed, drawing on traditions that will be immediately recognizable to Witcher readers: the dark forest as a conscious entity, the village as a fragile outpost of human order, the wizard as a figure of ambiguous authority. If you only read one book on this list, make it this one. Its emotional range, from terror to tenderness to awe, captures something essential about why Sapkowski’s world endures.
For Readers Who Need the Darkest Possible Fantasy, the Kind That Leaves Marks
There is a register of dark fantasy that goes beyond morally gray characters and political cynicism. It is the kind of darkness that asks whether goodness can survive contact with the actual world, and it does not guarantee a comforting answer. These books operate at that frequency.
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
This is Buehlman’s masterpiece, and I do not use that word lightly. Between Two Fires is set in 1348 France, during the Black Death, and its premise is that the plague is not merely a disease but the opening salvo in a second war between Heaven and Hell. Thomas, a disgraced knight turned brigand, rescues a young girl named Delphine who claims to see angels. Together, with an alcoholic priest as their third companion, they journey across a France that has become a literal battleground between the divine and the demonic.
Originally published in 2012, this book experienced a remarkable second life through BookTok recommendations, eventually becoming a New York Times and USA Today bestseller more than a decade after its initial release. Tor acquired it for a deluxe reissue in 2026 with a foreword by Joe Hill. The prose is staggering, drawing on Buehlman’s background as a prize-winning poet. The horror is visceral but purposeful, and the emotional payoff of the final chapters is something I have rarely experienced in any genre. Pierce Brown called it mythic and poignant. Joe Abercrombie called it haunting. They are both right.
The Black Company by Glen Cook
Glen Cook’s The Black Company was published in 1984, and it is the headwater of almost everything we now call grimdark fantasy. Abercrombie has cited it. Erikson has cited it. Even Sapkowski’s work exists in a literary ecosystem that Cook helped create. The novel follows Croaker, a soldier and chronicler in a mercenary company that has been fighting other people’s wars for centuries. The Company’s current employer is the Lady, a figure of immense sorcerous power whose moral status is, to put it generously, complicated.
What Cook pioneered, and what remains powerful about these books forty years later, is the grunt’s-eye-view of fantasy warfare. There are no sweeping battlefield panoramas. There is mud, confusion, bad food, worse decisions, and the grim camaraderie of people who have no illusions about why they are fighting. Geralt would recognize these soldiers immediately. They are professionals doing ugly work because it is the only work available, and they have long since stopped pretending that the side they fight for is the right one. This is the root system of modern dark fantasy, and reading it feels like discovering the source code.
Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
I will not pretend that Gardens of the Moon, the first volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, is an easy read. It is not. Erikson drops you into a world of staggering complexity with minimal hand-holding, and the learning curve is steep enough to turn many readers away before the book’s true qualities emerge. But for those who stay, the reward is a ten-book series of unmatched ambition, a fantasy epic that takes on imperialism, genocide, compassion, and the weight of history with a seriousness that the genre rarely attempts.
The connection to The Witcher is tonal rather than structural. Both Sapkowski and Erikson treat their fictional worlds as places where history has mass, where the decisions of centuries past create the conditions that present characters must navigate. Erikson’s scope is vaster, his cast numbered in the hundreds, but the underlying concern is the same: what does it mean to try to be decent in a world that punishes decency? The Malazan series has sold millions of copies and developed one of the most devoted readerships in fantasy. It demands your attention and your patience. It pays you back with interest.
For Readers Who Want Morally Complex Outsiders in Worlds That Reject Them
At its heart, The Witcher is a story about a man who belongs nowhere. Geralt is human enough to be despised by the nonhumans and inhuman enough to be feared by the humans. If that particular species of alienation is what resonates with you, these final books understand that feeling at the bone level.
The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
This slim, venomous novella is one of the most unsettling things I have read in recent years, and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order. Johann is a creature without a name, without a memory, without a death, a thing that crawled out of the harbor of Elendhaven and adopted a human shape the way you might adopt a coat. He kills because it is what he is. Then he meets Florian, a sickly aristocrat with secrets and ambitions of his own, and the two form a partnership that is as disturbing as it is compelling.
Giesbrecht is interested in what happens when the monster knows it is a monster and does not care. That is not Geralt, exactly, but it is a dark mirror of Geralt’s central question: what separates the monster from the man? The prose is lush and controlled, with the kind of gothic sensibility that recalls Shirley Jackson more than Tolkien. At under 160 pages, this is a book you can read in an afternoon. You will think about it for considerably longer than that.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series begins with Gideon the Ninth, a book that defies easy genre classification. It is science fantasy. It is a locked-room mystery. It is necromancy as a system of government. Gideon Nav is a swordswoman trapped in servitude to a decaying house of the dead, and when she is drafted into a competition between necromancers, she brings a two-handed sword and an attitude that Geralt would recognize immediately: exhaustion masked by sarcasm, competence masked by indifference.
What Muir accomplishes with tone is remarkable. Gideon the Ninth is genuinely funny, with a voice that blends internet-era irreverence with the cadences of Gothic literature, and simultaneously gut-wrenching. The world-building is intricate and bizarre, a solar system ruled by a god-emperor where the fundamental magical art involves manipulating bones and spirits. The outsider dynamic here, Gideon’s refusal to belong to a system that was never designed for her benefit, hits the same nerve that Sapkowski strikes with Geralt’s relationship to the world of humans. This series is four books deep now, and it keeps getting stranger and better.
The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter
Evan Winter’s debut novel hit with the force of a book that had been waiting a long time to exist. The Rage of Dragons is set among the Omehi, a displaced people locked in an unwinnable war on a hostile continent. One in every two thousand women can call dragons. One in every hundred men can channel rage into superhuman strength. Everyone else fights and dies in the sand. Tau, born without any gifts, watches the people he loves destroyed by the political machinations of his own society and decides to become the greatest swordsman alive through sheer, self-destructive will.
The revenge structure here echoes the darker corridors of the Witcher saga, those moments when Sapkowski showed us what happens when grief turns into purpose and purpose turns into obsession. Winter’s combat sequences are visceral and relentlessly paced, and his world-building draws on pre-colonial African cultures in a way that feels both specific and organic. He self-published the novel originally before it was picked up by Orbit, and the series has become one of the most talked-about debuts in contemporary fantasy. Tau and Geralt are different men in different worlds, but they share a willingness to let the work of violence reshape them entirely, and both stories ask whether that transformation can ever be undone.
A Final Reflection on Why These Books Matter
The best fantasy literature does not offer escape from the real world. It offers a mirror held at an angle, showing us truths we could not see head-on.
That is what Sapkowski understood from the beginning, and it is what connects every book on this list. These are not books that imitate The Witcher. They are books that share its convictions: that fantasy is at its most powerful when it refuses to simplify, that characters earn our loyalty through their imperfections rather than their virtues, and that a world built with care and specificity will always outlast one built on borrowed templates.
The Witcher franchise, between its nine books, the Netflix series now heading into its fifth and final season, and CD Projekt Red’s Witcher 4 in full production, shows no signs of fading. But the literary tradition it belongs to is deeper and wider than any single property. Sapkowski did not invent dark fantasy. He inherited it from Glen Cook and Michael Moorcock and Stanislaw Lem and the Slavic storytelling traditions that predate all of them. And the writers on this list are doing the same, inheriting and transforming, taking the raw material of human storytelling and making something that could not have existed before they sat down to write it.
If you have finished the Witcher and you feel that ache, that specific longing for a world that treated you like an adult, these seventeen books are where I would start. Not because they are The Witcher. Nothing is The Witcher. But because they understand what The Witcher was trying to do, and they are trying to do it too, each in their own voice, each with their own fire.
Read widely. Read impatiently. And when someone tells you that fantasy is not serious literature, hand them any book from this list and walk away. The work speaks for itself.