This week's picks share something: both are epic fantasy that never fit the shape the genre usually takes in English-language bookshops. One was simply never translated. The other was shelved as a children's series for decades. If you have ever felt that the books you love sit slightly outside the genre's main road, these are for you.
Horde of the Counterwind, by Alain Damasio
In France, La Horde du Contrevent has been a cult classic since the early 2000s. English readers could not read it until now. Abrams published the first English translation, by Alexander Dickow, in the US on 13 October, with a UK edition due in November.
The premise is the kind of thing epic fantasy rarely attempts. A world is scoured by a wind that never stops. A team of twenty-three, each trained from birth for a single role, walks into it on foot, trying to reach its source. Thirty-two hordes have tried before them and failed. It is a quest novel built on endurance rather than conquest, told in many voices, and it is famously demanding on the page, which is why the translation took so long.
Why we are highlighting it: it is a reminder that some of the most ambitious epic fantasy of the last twenty years was written outside English, and that patient, strange, collective stories have an audience. Many readers will arrive because it inspired the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. They will find something bigger than a tie-in.
The Complete Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Library of America has collected all six Earthsea books in two volumes, edited by Brian Attebery. Volume One holds A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. Volume Two holds Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. The set adds Le Guin's own essays on the series and her hand-drawn maps, and is available as a boxed set.
Why we are highlighting it: Earthsea is an archipelago, not a continent, its hero is not white, and its later books turn and question the power fantasies the early ones seemed to promise. For years it lived on children's shelves. Seeing it collected alongside American literary classics is a quiet correction, and the later volumes in particular reward readers who want epic fantasy that grows up with them.
If these are the kinds of books you go looking for, you are the reader Map's Edge Media publishes for.