You wish to know the unknowable? See the unseeable? To understand the eldritch mind of a god? Well you’re in luck! These fantasy authors are more than happy to help you make like the Sistine Chapel roof and touch tips with the divine. While myth-makers have been recounting deeds of the immortals since ancient days, these books provide a modern spin on the pantheons past. Bow down and grovel in your mortal unworthiness, because here come the 10 best fantasy books about gods and immortals!
The Daughter of the Moon Goddess
A modern reimagining of ancient Chinese divinities, Sue Lynn Tan’s The Daughter of the Moon Goddess is the story of an immortal nepobaby born to a member of a holy pantheon. Despite her celestial parentage, Xingyin lives a semi-charmed life on the moon in secret. She’s the daughter of an exiled goddess on the run from the Celestial Emperor, and after his imperial majesty catches wind that the Moon Goddess had a clandestine daughter, Xingyin is forced to flee across the stars to seek safety. Alone, unfriended, and disguised as a commoner in the vast Celestial Kingdom, Xingyin will need to learn to carve out her own path if she wants to stay living an immortal life. Poetic, romantic, and utterly spellbinding, Xingyin’s story feels like an age old myth written in the modern day.
Circe
Madeline Miller’s Circe is the story of the divine daughter of the sun god Helios, who is exiled from her father’s halls after she turns one of her bullies into a sea monster with the powers of witchcraft. Go girl. Now alone on the shores of a deserted isle, Circe is free to spend her immortal days perfecting her magical arts, experimenting with the island’s many plants to brew up potions of all kinds. One of these concoctions turns sailors into pigs, and as Homer points out in the original source material The Odyssey, this particular poultice is one of Circe’s favorites. As achingly romantic as Song of Achilles before it, Miller’s second novel is a tender meditation on immortality – one the questions whether or not deathless existence is a life worth living.
The Malazan Book of The Fallen
While the gods seldom appear in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan of Book of The Fallen, the reverberations of their immortal acts echo throughout a dying empire. The tome-like texts of this series detail the rise and ruin of Malazan spurred on by the whims and wants of divinities above. While Malazan‘s pantheon is lore-rich enough to make a wizard’s beard hairs stand on end, the story of one god in particular rises higher than all the rest: The Broken God. This fractured divinity was summoned to the world from a parallel universe by a group of mages plotting revolution, unaware that the god’s arrival would bring untold destruction upon the land. The Malazan Book of the Fallen is an unflinching look at the folly of man, a creature undone by his own ambitions, who grasps at the stars only to come hurdling back down to the ground below. Tragic.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
N.K. Jemison’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the story of a woman who inherits the throne of the world. Nepobaby much? After the outcast Yeine is summoned to the floating city of Sky, she’s informed that she is one of three heirs to the imperial throne – a candidate to rule the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. That is, unless her two political rivals do away with her first. In order to survive her upcoming trials, Yeine will a divine stroke of luck. The city of Sky runs on the power of shackled divinities – and Yeine will soon strike up an uneasy friendship with one of the most potent gods of all. Jemison’s novel is a story of liberation, one where both mortals and gods break free from the chains that bind them.
The Witch’s Heart
A restitching of the tapestry of Viking legends, Genevieve Gornichec’s The Witch’s Heart is the story of one of Norse mythology’s lesser known figures. Before Angrboda became the wife of Loki and the mother of the god-devouring wolf Fenrir, she was a jötunn witch who was persecuted by the Odin. After the All Father attempted to burn her at the stake when she refused to provide him a prophecy, the injured witch limped off into the forest – and fell into the arms of the trickster god himself. Living together in secret, Loki and Angrboda raised three children, but after Odin catches wind that the woman he condemned to die still lives, he’s planning to finish the job. How far will one witch go to protect her family? Odin is already missing one eye, Angrboda is more than ready to rip out the other.
The Raven Tower
Narrated by an omnipotent rock, Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower is the story of a covenant between the gods and a kingdom they have sworn to protect. The Strength and Patience of the Hill is a god who lives inside of a giant boulder, and as such has been around for a very long time. Old S&P provides the reader with a complete history of this bizarre and god haunted world, beginning from prehistory and detailing the rise and fall of the kingdom of Iraden – a decline spurred on by the breaking of an ancient agreement between the realm and a raven god. The Raven Tower forgoes traditional sword and sorcery tropes to tell a melancholy, existential and eerily beautiful tale of mankind’s follies… who knew rocks could be so poetic?
Berserk
Kentaro Miura’s Berserk is the one of the darkest tales of divinity ever written – downright Lovecraftian in its sheer existential horror. In a crapsack world inspired by Medieval Europe, a lone warrior named Guts hunts for the head of a former comrade – a man who betrayed him in order to ascend to godhood. The gods of Berserk are a downright dismal bunch, dark angels that promise immortal and demonic life for those wiling to sacrifice all that they love. With a sword the size of a four door sedan, Guts is keen to snuff out those demonic lives one swing at a time. One of the most twisted works of dark fantasy ever conceived, Berserk‘s evil pantheon makes the Greek gods look like a Boy Scout troop.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
According to author Christopher Moore, early Christian scholars overlooked key scripture when compiling what would become the modern day Bible. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal is exactly what’s written on the tin, a sacred account of Jesus’ halcyon days as narrated by his best friend. At the behest of the frustrated angel Raziel – who is frantically trying to compile an accurate version of the Good Book – Biff recounts his and Jesus’s journey to visit the Three Wise Men, while shedding a little light on the origins of human inventions like judo and cappuccino along the way. Boisterous. Blasphemous. Brilliant.
Gods of Jade and Shadow
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow is the story of Casiopea Tun, a young woman stuck scrubbing the floors of her grandfather’s mansion in Jazz Age Mexico. One day during her housekeeping, she discovers a mysterious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. After pulling a Pandora and popping it open, a Mayan god of death springs into Casiopea’s world of living, and he implores that she help him reclaim his underworld throne from his brother/betrayer. What begins as a jaunt across Mexico soon deepens into a slow burn romance – which the pair will need to brighten the way in the darkness of a Mayan underworld. After all, there’s giant bat monsters down there.
The Bone Season
Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season is the story of a dystopia where the supernatural is outlawed, and any person caught practicing “unnatural” arts will dealt with severely. Does nineteen year old clairvoyant Paige Mahoney care about the consequences of using her powers? Hell no. She’s too busy trying to make a buck in the criminal underworld. Paige’s life changes fast when the powers that be get wise to her abilities, and she’s captured and taken away to the secret city of Oxford. Her jailer is one of the Rephaim, a group of angelic alien beings that secret pull the strings of society – except this particular Reph is different. He’s plotting revolution against his own immortal kind. Well, they’re sort of immortal. Biologically at least. They can be killed. And trust me, with when these two team up, plenty will be.
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