Fantasy Books Like Brandon Sanderson (12 Epic Series for Stormlight & Mistborn Fans)

If it’s still hard to name what you want after Sanderson, try the book finder. It asks about mood, pace, and how long you want to stay. Find your next fantasy book.

Foundryside

Scriving convinces objects that reality works differently: a wheel believes it’s rolling downhill, a door believes it’s locked. The pleasure comes from learning that logic and then watching thieves, merchants, and empires abuse it. Start here if Allomancy made you want to understand the mechanism, not merely admire the effect.

The difference: Foundryside is angrier about ownership. Its magic is tied to labor, surveillance, and commercial power, and the world feels closer to an industrial city than a mythic continent.

Lightbringer

Drafters turn colors into materials with distinct properties, which makes combat tactical and lets the magic shape religion and political rank. It’s a natural fit for readers who enjoy a system whose limits matter in the middle of a fight.

It’s also a five-book series with a louder, rougher tone and an ending that divides readers. Go in for the magical engineering and escalating conflict, not for a copy of Sanderson’s voice.

The Powder Mage Trilogy

Powder mages consume gunpowder, sharpen their senses, and manipulate bullets while a revolution tears through the old order. The rules are easy to grasp, the battles move quickly, and the books rarely forget that supplies, distance, and politics can ruin a brilliant plan.

The Licanius Trilogy

Licanius is less about tactile magical experimentation and more about the machinery of prophecy, identity, and time. Its closest Sanderson-like quality is structural: early mysteries matter later, and the trilogy is built to make its ending reframe what came before.

The opening leans on familiar fantasy furniture, and the character work isn’t as textured as the plotting. Read it when you want an intricate completed puzzle.

The Wheel of Time

The obvious bridge is obvious for a reason. The series offers prophecy, distinct cultures, a magic system with boundaries, enormous casts, and revelations planted far in advance. Sanderson completed the final three volumes from Jordan’s notes, so the connection is literal as well as tonal.

The cost is fourteen main novels, repeated character tics, and stretches where the larger plot barely moves. If you want efficiency, this is the wrong door. If you want residence, it may be the right one.

Malazan Book of the Fallen

Malazan supplies the scale—empires, gods, soldiers, ancient peoples, and wars with roots no living character fully understands—without Sanderson’s impulse to explain the floor plan. Erikson expects the reader to assemble context while events are already moving.

Choose it for historical depth and astonishing convergence. Skip it if being deliberately disoriented for long stretches feels like homework.

The Faithful and the Fallen

This is the direct, muscular option: a large cast, old prophecies, shifting loyalties, found family, and battles that keep the story moving. Its magic isn’t as system-heavy, but its four-book arc delivers the mounting scale and emotional payoff many Stormlight readers are chasing.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

A crew of confidence artists targets the powerful in a city built on the remains of an older civilization. The attraction isn’t epic scale but construction: cons nest inside other cons, details return with new meaning, and the friendship at the center keeps the cleverness from becoming sterile.

The series is unfinished. The first book, however, tells a satisfying story of its own and is the easiest low-commitment test on this page.

The First Law

Abercrombie shares Sanderson’s skill at arranging converging characters and reversals, then uses it toward a far more cynical destination. The magic stays mysterious, institutions are rotten, and improvement is neither clean nor guaranteed.

Read it for voice, character, and brutal payoff. Don’t choose it when what you want preserved is Sanderson’s underlying optimism.

A Song of Ice and Fire

The appeal here is consequence: political choices travel, old grievances survive, and small decisions can break kingdoms. Its plot architecture is immense, but the series is unfinished and much harsher in its treatment of violence and sexual violence.

The Name of the Wind

Rothfuss offers a gifted protagonist, learnable magic, secrets buried in story, and a strong interest in how legends are made. What changes is the engine: this is a voice-led recollection, more concerned with performance and memory than with marching toward a battlefield climax.

The trilogy is unfinished. Read the first two books only if the experience can be worth more to you than closure.

The Broken Earth Trilogy

A continent repeatedly tears itself apart, and the people able to control geological force are feared, trained, and exploited. Jemisin gives you a coherent magical premise and major revelations, but she refuses the comfort of a conventional heroic journey.

The trilogy is complete, formally ambitious, and emotionally severe. It’s a good next step when you want the architecture of epic fantasy pushed into less familiar shapes.