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As always, this is not a comprehensive list, but only includes all the books I have heard about so far.
If you have a fantasy novel you are self publishing in January or beyond, let me know by filling out THIS FORM, and I shall add it to the page. There are but 3 requirements:
1) It must be a self published fantasy novel.
2) It must have a Goodreads page.
3) It must have a cover.
6th January – Murder in the Temple (The Soar Chronicles #1) by Malory
LitRPG
Welcome to Soar, where your Level, your Class, and your god decide how you live and how you die. Unless you’re Jana Lowe. Then you’re all kinds of screwed.
When a High Priestess turns up dead in her own temple, the city does what it always does; shrugs and keeps moving. Corruption’s just part of the landscape, and dead holy women aren’t rare enough to make the betting books. But this particular corpse has Jana’s name written all over it, and for once, that might not be a bad thing.
Once, he had a Class, a patron god, and a future. Now? He’s broke, suspended, and, worst of all, fresh out of divine favour. Just a low-Level Private Investigator with limited Skills and a very punchable face.
To crack the case, Jana has to find a way to level up without a god’s blessing, dodge the wrong kind of attention, and wade through a city where faith is currency and murder’s just part of the market. And if he lives long enough to find the killer? Maybe – just maybe – he’ll be allowed to get his job back.
He’s Classless. Broke. Out of luck. But murder in Soar? That’s his kind of trouble.
11th January – Death’s Realm (Guardians of the Path #7) by Nicole DragonBeck
Epic Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, YA
To restore the light, she must embrace the dark. One wrong choice could cause the very end she was meant to prevent.
The enemy has offered Ria the key to the Torch’s final piece, giving her a treacherous trust the architect of destruction to save creation, or let the world collapse. Ria and her companions must now journey to a forbidden place, a realm the living are not permitted to enter, and from which there may be no return.
Death’s Realm is unsettled. A sickness and violent tremors signal that the Walls are failing, threatening to plunge all worlds of the Path into final Chaos. Death Himself, ever bound by His Mandate, can only watch as history begins to repeat.
Armies gather. War approaches. Time favors no one and a single question looms before them all – Witches, princesses, Makers, and the Singer of the Grey Song
Will the Balance hold long enough for them to save magyc, or will the realms collapse into Chaos around them?
13th January – Hunter (Quest Unbound #1) by Marie Andreas
Sword & Sorcery
Raelyn led a simple life—wealth redistribution. As someone who grew up in the orphan workhouse, she knew money was always in short supply.
The extremely wealthy didn’t always need it.
While on a simple retrieval job for the woman she worked for, Raelyn finds unwelcome attention.
The type that could end her career. And life.
Falling in with the handsome man who tried to rob her, after she’d just robbed a nobleman, wasn’t on her list of life goals.
But the pouch she stole wasn’t what she’d been told, and the woman who hired her paid the ultimate price.
With death and mayhem falling around her, she had no choice but to grab her beloved horse, Moose, and join the would-be thief and his companions on a dangerous quest.
One that would mean the end of the world as she knows it if they fail.
And the quest isn’t playing fair.
15th January – The Unnamed (The Book of Names #1) by M.S. Masood
Epic Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, Romance
Reim was raised for one purpose: to inherit the Vuorian throne—a crown that demands she protect her fractured, volatile kingdom from those within its walls who seek to ruin it—the Unnamed. A destiny few believe she can fulfill. Least of all, Reim herself.
With her beloved father’s health rapidly declining, and the threat of insurrection looming, she makes a desperate deal—sealed in magic and blood—with an enigmatic Unnamed man known only as the healer. But when he finally comes to collect his due, the price he demands not only has the power to destroy her, but everything she thought she knew about honor, justice…and love.
17th January – Caldera’s Edge (Distored Perceptions #1) by Dan Krawchuk
Science Fantasy
The year is 2331. The Earth has become uninhabitable, and what is left of humanity is split into small colonies on Mars and the moon. Stranded with failing technology, the two sects of humanity struggle to both survive and stay in contact with each other.
Maria Earl is an Emergency Systems Technologist from the Hellas Planitia colony on Mars. Having made one too many mistakes, she is on the verge of being suspended from her role, when she is inexplicably assigned to investigate the failure of a crucial piece of technology.
Now Maria must make the dangerous journey from her colony to the summit of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system, to complete her mission. But something doesn’t add up. Why was she assigned to such an important job? And what are the strange, swirling visions that keep intruding on her perception? Mars is only the beginning, and the more Maria finds out about her world, the stranger things get.
20th January – Errant Mage (Legacy of the Lost Mage #5) by TJ Muir
Epic Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, Cozy Fantasy
Magic was outlawed for Five Hundred Years. Kadaris is starting to understand why.
Newly embedded among Canowin’s student mages, Kadaris is desperate to prove she belongs—before her rivals decide she doesn’t. But her real problem is the relic she never should have touched: an ancient scepter that can amplify power… and attract the kind of attention that gets mages hunted.
Fern has her own war to fight. Once trained as a shadow dancer, she’s now sworn to protect the da’har—and someone has already slipped an assassin inside the castle. While the court argues about whether magic is a threat or a necessity, Fern follows the evidence into dark corners: missing ledgers, silenced witnesses, and whispers that anti-mage zeal is turning into a purge.
When Kadaris comes to Fern for help, neither of them is ready for what an alliance will cost. One is hiding forbidden power. The other is hunting a conspiracy that could shatter the realm. Together, they’ll have to choose who to trust—because if Kadaris loses control, and Fern fails to expose the enemy, Finoren won’t survive what comes next.
20th January – There Be Dragons Here (Tales of Aedrea) by S.L. Rowland
Cozy Fantasy
At 182 years old, Hilda Rockfall thought her adventuring days were long behind her.
For over seventy years, she roamed the realm as a ranger with the adventuring party Stone & Splendor—taking quests, slaying beasts, and collecting monster teeth like trophies from the boundless sea to the edge of the wilds. But for the past eight decades, she’s traded her sword for slippers, living the quiet life of a proud grandmother nestled in the mountains, telling tales no one quite believes and baking a mean honey crumble.
That peace is shattered when an old friend—and former party member—passes on and leaves Hilda one final quest: scatter his ashes at a secret location marked on a map they looted back in their glory days.
Hilda figures it’ll be a nice little hike. Maybe a nostalgic trip down memory lane.
But then she opens the map.
And scrawled across the bottom in faded ink are four unsettling words:
There be dragons here.
26th January – The Crane Maiden (The Ember Lily Arc #1) by M.H. Woodscourt
Epic Fantasy, YA
War has reached her doorstep.
She will answer with a sword.
When her little sister dies during an enemy raid, Jenai prays to Holy Afallon seeking protection for her village. What she doesn’t expect is to hear a Voice telling her that she must personally lead the armies of Fraelin against the growing threat.
Joined by a gentle unicorn and a few brave allies, Jenai sets out to liberate Fraelin—even at the risk of her own freedom.
However, the road to war isn’t straightforward. Jenai must first gain the trust of the Crane Prince by convincing him she’s not a fraud. Will the Church of Afallon accept her calling or will they condemn her as a heretic?
26th January – The Bad Apothecary (Ninth Path #1) by Keon Shore
genres
Diwu stumbles into the capital half-dead, wounded by something no healer can cure. Nestled in her flesh is a strange pathogen carrying corruption, the antithesis of the Natural Order.
Desperate, she trades freedom for survival and falls into the grip of the Hierarchy, a ruthless organization that keeps power in check by any means necessary. Their treatment in exchange for loyalty. Service. Obedience.
Her first assignment entangles her with Nex Teres, a battle-hardened cultivator with no interest in playing agent. But the Hierarchy doesn’t ask—it coerces. Bound by duty and circumstance, they’re sent to a lawless outpost where Diwu was first infected, and where the name of a long-dead legend has the Bad Apothecary.
27th January – Snowmane by Iseult Murphy
Epic Fantasy, Novella
The sea around a sun-drenched island suddenly freezes.
A groom returns for his wedding with his hair turned as white as snow.
Neci has never known cold or snow on her idyllic island home. Yet her groom, Hoddle, brings ice as bright as his newly whitened hair when he returns to the island with her wedding gift. Nothing will stop Neci from going ahead with the wedding. Not the cold, Hoddle’s changed appearance, nor the odd behaviour of the rest of his party.
On her wedding night, Neci wakes to find Hoddle gone. Her village cloaked in freezing snow. And two enormous creatures, a white wolf and a white owl, who want her help.
As the cold seeps into Neci’s family and friends, the wolf and owl give her one option. Help them stop Hoddle or lose her home and everything she loves to permanent snow and ice.
But Neci doesn’t know if she can trust the wolf and owl. There must be another way to save her husband.
29th January – Lianna and the Hombit by Valinora Troy
Epic Fantasy
A grieving girl in need of a friend. A magical creature with a secret task. Can they end the ancient curse threatening their new home?
13-year-old Lianna has lost her home, her friends, and most devastatingly, her beloved Papa. Sent to live with her uncle, Lianna is certain he will be cruel and unkind, for why else would Papa have run away when he was young? Robbed on arrival of her precious keepsakes, Lianna receives a worse-than-expected welcome from her uncle. His servants are hostile and even her grandparents seem to glare at her from their portraits over the fire.
When a magical creature resembling a small glass bird bursts into her life in a mix of sparks and fire, Lianna is eager to assist the hombit with its secret mission if it helps her return home. Which leads to Lianna undertaking a risky dive near perilous sea stacks known as ‘living rocks’.
When her dive goes wrong, she awakens a creature that seeks to rob her of her humanity.
To survive, Lianna must uncover the dark secrets of her father’s past. Now she faces a stark does she save herself or the town that rejects both her and her father?
30th January – Tomb of Tomes (Shadowbinders #1.5) by Andrew Watson
Dark Fantasy, Novella
History is told by the survivors. But survivors do not see the worst the world has to offer.
The lost library of Nenelan was thought to be nothing more than myth. It was said to hold the secrets of Tarrisian history and the long sought after cause of the cataclysm that splintered the country. So when whispers of its discovery reach the ears of the scholars, a race to uncover the truth begins.
But Yeru must face more than ambitious scholars. Buried beneath the desert sand, the ancient library holds more than just books.
Perhaps some discoveries are better left unfound.