For many readers, summertime is their time to escape into a epic story. A detailed story that will completely absorb them into another world or another time.
Listed here are five epic fiction reading suggestions that are at least 500+ pages long.
If you read them all, it will be 3426 pages of epic reading…. Enjoy.
Promise of Blood (M)
by Brian McClellan
548 pages
Field Marshal Tamas’ coup against his king sent corrupt aristocrats to the guillotine and brought bread to the starving. But it also provoked war with the Nine Nations, internal attacks by royalist fanatics, and greedy scrambling for money and power by Tamas’s supposed allies: the Church, workers unions, and mercenary forces. Stretched to his limit, Tamas is relying heavily on his few remaining powder mages, including the embittered Taniel, a brilliant marksman who also happens to be his estranged son, and Adamat, a retired police inspector whose loyalty is being tested by blackmail. Now, as attacks batter them from within and without, the credulous are whispering about omens of death and destruction. Just old peasant legends about the gods waking to walk the earth. No modern educated man believes that sort of thing. But they should.
“McClellan’s debut packs some serious heat…. A thoroughly satisfying yarn that should keep readers waiting impatiently for further installments.” – Kirkus Reviews
~~~
God of War (M)
by Christian Cameron
773 pages
The story of how Alexander the Great conquered the world – first crushing Greek resistance to Macedonian rule, then destroying the Persian Empire in three monumental battles, before marching into the unknown and final victory in India – is a truly epic tale that has mesmerised countless generations of listeners. He crammed more adventure into his thirty-three years than any other human being before or since, and now for the first time a novelist will tell the tale in a single suitably epic volume. The combination of Alexander’s life story and Christian Cameron’s unrivalled skills as an historian and storyteller will ensure that this will not only be the definitive version for many years to come, but also one of the most exciting historical epics ever written.
“The more Cameron’s 700-page story progresses, the more impressive it becomes. Detail is piled upon detail to reconstruct the Alexandrian world… brilliantly evoked. Cameron has risen to the challenge of creating a portrait of Alexander that matches – and often eclipses – those of earlier novelists.” – Sunday Times
~~~
The Legend of Broken (M)
by Caleb Carr
734 pages
Some years ago, a remarkable manuscript long rumored to exist was discovered: The Legend of Broken. It tells of a prosperous fortress city where order reigns at the point of a sword—even as scheming factions secretly vie for control of the surrounding kingdom. Meanwhile, outside the city’s granite walls, an industrious tribe of exiles known as the Bane forages for sustenance in the wilds of Davon Wood.
“An excellent and old-fashioned entertainment . . . The Legend of Broken seamlessly blends epic adventure with serious research and asks questions that men and women grappled with in the Dark Ages and still do today.” – The Washington Post
~~~
Where Tigers Are at Home (M)
by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
– translated from the French by Mike Mitchell
817 pages
When Eleazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent, begins editing a strange, unpublished biography of 17th century Jesuit scholar Kircher, the rest of his life seems to begin unraveling — his ex-wife goes on a dangerous geological expedition to Mato Grosso, his daughter abandons school to travel with her young professor and her lesbian lover to an indigenous beach town, and Eleazard himself starts losing his sanity.
“Blas de Robles, who won the Prix Medicis for this work, presents an absurdist literary narrative for readers who have the patience and persistence to stay with him on this long, strange, mind-bending trip.” – Library Journal
~~~
The Street Sweeper (M)
by Elliot Perlman
554 pages
From the civil rights struggle in the United States to the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there are momentous stories everywhere. But only some survive to become history. This is an astonishing feat of storytelling that addresses the personal and the political as it sweeps across the globe, through the seminal events of the twentieth century to the present. Honest, hypnotic and redemptive, this is a novel that explores the responsibility of the historian, the weight of history on all of us, and the crucial role that bearing witness plays in breaking the cycle of human cataclysm.
“Acclaimed Australian writer Perlman is a master at meshing his characters’ streams of consciousness with social tsunamis of hate and violence. In his intently detailed, worlds-within-worlds third novel, this discerning and unflinching investigator of moral dilemmas great and small takes on the monstrous horrors of racism in America and the Holocaust.” – Booklist
