Welcome back to Book Break. Today's video is all about
epic book series in every genre, and I'm getting ready to do a lot of heavy
lifting. I have got so many books laid out at my feet right
now ready to show you. So let's kick off with an epic
historical fiction series. I have got here the Kingsbridge series
by Ken Follett. These are his classic historical
masterpieces. I'm gonna put this one down for now
because it's a heavy one, but don't worry I'll tell you about this in a second.
These books were the original Kingsbridge trilogy,
set in the fictional city of Kingsbridge where in this first novel, The Pillars of
the Earth, a monk develops this ambition to build
the finest Gothic cathedral that the world has ever seen.
So you get so many characters involved in this. The series spans
centuries, following the legacy of this city and its cathedral,
and now at last Ken Follett has written a prequel.
This is The Evening and the Morning. And there has been so much excitement about
this book. This takes us all the way back to the
year 1000 when England is under constant attack from the Vikings, and it
explores everything that happens up to the events of The
Pillars of the Earth. So this takes an already sweeping
historical fiction series and embeds it even further back into history. And in
this book we're really exploring how the intense conflict of this time
sparked the origins of a legal system that benefited more than just the people
at the top. So this has been a massively hyped book
to complete an already beloved series, but this isn't the only epic book
series that Ken Follett has written. He's apparently just the master of the
epic book series. Let's look at another. This is the Century trilogy. So this is a
series of historical fiction political thrillers,
which kicks off during the first world war, with the first book Fall of Giants.
And here we follow five interconnected families with overlapping lives,
and follow them through the events of the war, the Russian revolution,
the fight for women's suffrage, and see how their lives and fates are entangled.
And then throughout the rest of the series we follow the generations of
these same five families through so many more major historical
events, so the rise of the third reich, the cold war,
the cuban missile crisis, the building and tearing down of the
berlin wall, it's such a sweeping look at history
and how these very different families are affected in very different ways.
And then one more historical fiction series, but this time an epic
mystery series: this is the Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom.
And this is where my arms are gonna get really tired. So these books follow a
lawyer called Matthew Shardlake who ends up investigating
some of the darkest and most intriguing mysteries of the tudor period.
So it kicks off with the first book Dissolution, and i'm going to put the
rest of them down for now. Dissolution begins as Henry VIII has
just proclaimed himself the Supreme Head of the Church of
England, and declared that the monasteries are to be dissolved.
But on the coast of Sussex, a horrific crime has just taken place at a
monastery with very threatening clues left behind
for Shardlake to investigate. And as the series takes us through the
years, we also move from Sussex to London to Portsmouth to Norwich, which is where
the seventh book Tombland takes place. And we actually
made a whole video dedicated to this book
where we went to Norwich and explored the Tombland area,
looking at the real history behind the book. So I will link to that video so you
can check it out. Picking these up one more time, to show
you that there are seven books in this series
so far. So you might want to catch up on these before anything else comes out.
But now shaking up our genres, let's move to that other genre most commonly
paired with the word epic: fantasy.
And of course you would all
shout at me in the comments if I didn't talk about The Lord of the Rings
series by J.R.R. Tolkien, often considered to have started
the entire high fantasy genre. And does anyone still need me to tell them what
Lord of the Rings is about? Because if so, I won't be the best at
this job because I haven't read it, but I have sat through at least one of
the incredibly long films, so I can at least tell you it's about a
hobbit called Frodo, who receives a magic ring from his uncle,
that he's warned is incredibly powerful and dangerous. And so he sets out with a
group of other hobbits, elves, dwarves and humans to safely
destroy this ring. Is that pretty much right? So Lord of
the Rings might have kickstarted the high fantasy genre,
but now all these years later, fantasy is one of the most
popular genres. Particularly here on BookTube, it is very beloved.
There's even a whole subgenre of YA fantasy
like, for example, the Children of Blood and Bone series by Tomi Adeyemi.
So I have here the first two books in the series: Children of Blood and Bone
and Children of Virtue and Vengeance. This is fantasy inspired by West African
mythology. So these books are set in a world where there used to be magic
until a king outlawed it and ordered that everyone with magical powers was to
be killed. Now only a very few remain and they all
have to stay hidden and that includes our main character
Zelie. But Zelie wants to bring magic back, and so this series follows her
journey to fight back against a tyrannical monarchy.
And there is one more book in the series to come, so you have got time to catch up
first. But I promised you in this video I would
bring you epic series from every genre. So now we've covered the
most prominent epic genres: history and fantasy.
Why not try an epic horror series? Dread Nation by Justina Ireland,
and its sequel Deathless Divide, are zombie novels set in an
alternate universe, where the American Civil War ended
because the dead at Gettysburg rose up and
killed soldiers from both sides of the war. Our main character was born just two
days before this happened, so we now meet up with her as she's
finishing up her combat training to become a bodyguard to a wealthy white
family, because in this alternate universe Black
and Native Americans are ordered to fight to protect the
white people. So it's a history rewrite, it's a zombie
horror novel, but it's also a commentary on race and a divided America.
Pretty epic scope. So next, while researching this video,
I tried to figure out if there could be such thing as epic comedy,
and I realised that Douglas Adams is the perfect author for this. He
is just full of epic hilarious adventures. He's very famous for writing
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series,
but he also wrote a time travel detective series that I wanted to show
you today. So this is Dirk Gently's Holistic
Detective Agency. So this first in the series, which is
called Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,
is about a private investigator who sets out to solve a murder,
assist a mysterious professor, save the entire human race from
extinction, and eat a lot of pizza. There is then a sequel
called the Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, but sadly Douglas Adams died when
he was halfway through writing the third in the series.
But you can still read it here, what he'd written so far of the Salmon of Doubt,
published here in the collection along with some of his other short stories.
But for some more serious science fiction, look no further than Adrian
Tchaikovsky. So this book, Children of Time, won the
Arthur C. Clarke award in 2016, and one of the things they commented on
was the universal scale of it. This takes epic to a whole
new level. Children of Time is about humanity's
battle for survival amongst the stars. So the last of the human race leave
behind a dying earth and set out to find a planet that their
ancestors had prepared for their arrival. But when they
get there, they find it occupied by new masters
who have turned it into mankind's worst nightmare.
And then there's a sequel, Children of Ruin, which is set
many many years later in the same universe but with
a whole new cast of characters and a whole new terror
waiting for humanity. But now, let's get back down to earth for a mystery a
little closer to home. This is the Seven Sisters series by
Lucinda Riley. These books are about the adopted
daughters of an elusive billionaire called Pa Salt,
who after his death, leaves each of them a clue to their true
heritage. And so in each book we're following a different sister,
trying to unlock the clues of their past. And the sisters' stories are rooted in
Greek mythology, and the story of the seven sisters constellation.
So we go back in time, we travel around the world, this is a beautifully sweeping
series that holds so many mysteries, like who really was
Pa Salt, and who is the mysterious seventh sister.
And this is another series that is still ongoing, so there are plenty more secrets
to uncover. For another pretty epic family, meet the
Cazalets. The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth
Jane Howard is a beloved family saga that follows this extremely privileged
family from 1937 through to the 1950s ,through three
generations, a world war, and a lot of change.
The last book in the series is even called All Change, and you can get these
beautiful floral editions, or I've actually got the first book in
the series here as a Picador classic. But whichever editions you read,
you will fall in love with all of the members of this family,
following all of their challenges and heartaches in a constantly changing
world. And finally let's finish with a romance.
So the Loyal League is a series by Alyssa Cole
that combines romance with spies. Each book in this series
follows a new couple, so we meet a lot of characters in different situations,
characters like undercover agents fighting against the confederacy,
to escaped prisoners, to soldiers, to former slaves,
each fighting for justice and fighting for love along the way.
So what are your favourite epic book series? Do leave your recommendations for
us in the comments below, and if you enjoyed
this format of books in every genre, I will link here to a video we
previously made on LGBTQIA+ books in every genre, so you can click
through and have a look at that, and we will see you next time.