Epic Books to Help You Escape Reality Until 'Game of Thrones'

Game of Thrones returns Sunday with all your giant dragon and Machiavellian plot needs. While you wait each week to see whether Jon Snow will stay king in the North, Daenerys will conquer Westeros, or the White Walkers will kill them all, here are seven amazing binge-worthy series—and one epic novel—to read.

If you love second-world fantasy, or stories that take place in an imagined world like Game of Thrones, there's no better recent series than N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. On the continent of Stillness, earthquakes and volcanoes are a constant threat as a larger catastrophe looms. The only people who can tame the earth, mutants called orogenes, are feared and oppressed. Jemisin's world-building is remarkable, taking us through the different societies and social classes, all in the middle of a world every bit as fascinating as Westeros. The first book in the trilogy, The Fifth Season, won the Hugo and the third book will be published this year. These are brilliant books—and important ones—as we enter an era of possibly irrevocable climate change here on earth.

Hilary Mantel's highly acclaimed novels about the rise of Thomas Cromwell under the reign of King Henry VIII aren't fantasy, but they are engrossing historical novels filled with medieval politics and Machiavellian maneuvers. Cromwell is the Littlefinger of King Henry's day, a man born to an insignificant family who rises, through will and brains, to become one of the most powerful figures in the realm. He's not nearly the creep Littlefinger is, though, at least in Mantel's version. Mantel depicts Cromwell as a pragmatic and sympathetic man even as he advises a king who is most famous for murdering his wives. The first two books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, each won Man Booker awards, in 2009 and 2012, respectively. The third book, The Mirror and the Light, will be published later this year. (The BBC mini-series adaptation with Mark Rylance as Cromwell is pretty fantastic, too.)

Stephen King's Dark Tower books are some of the craziest fantasy books you will ever read. Set (mostly) in a post-apocalyptic world called Mid-World, the books follow Roland the Gunslinger—the last of an order of gun-toting knights—on a quest to find the titular Dark Tower as he battles dark wizards, sex demons, lobster monsters, a riddle-obsessed monorail, and countless other King creations. The eight-volume series somehow manages to merge the genres of sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and western all together into a grand vision that sums up all of Stephen King's work (indeed, many of his other novels directly tie into the Dark Tower series). The series might fall apart a bit in the middle, but the whole series is imminently binge-able and the first four books are perhaps the greatest things King has ever written.

Plus, an adaptation starring Idris Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as his nemesis the Man in Black is being released this fall, so you'll want to binge these books before then.

Roberto Bolaño's epic masterpiece about literary critics, a mysterious German author, and the unsolved murders of female factory workers in contemporary Juárez, Mexico, doesn't have much to do with Game of Thrones, save for the horrifying violence, but it is certainly a book you will want to binge. Told in five parts, Bolaño's final, 800-plus-page book—he was working on it when he died from liver failure in 2003—spans continents and a vast cast of characters to create one of the most singular books in recent literary history. Just read it.

Every Game of Thrones-related list needs some dragons, and every list can be improved with some Ursula K. Le Guin. Long before dragons flew over Westeros or Harry Potter wielded a wand, the young wizard Ged from the island of Gont trained at a school for wizards and cavorted with wise dragons in the land of Earthsea. The first book in the series, 1968's A Wizard of Earthsea, sets up Le Guin's unique archipelago world where different islands contain different people—with Le Guin subverting the expectations that fantasy characters needed to be white and fantasy civilizations should resemble medieval Europe. Over the decades, Le Guin published four more novels and a number of short stories set in her magical island world.

If you are the type of reader who devours fantasy books as quickly as Tyrion guzzles wine, perhaps Pratchett's famous comic fantasy series Discworld is what you need to binge. Pratchett's massive fantasy series about a flat world that rides through space on the back of a giant turtle contains 41 books. While Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books deconstruct many of the tropes of fantasy writers like Tolkien and Howard, Pratchett straight up parodies them. The series is so sprawling that there are even handy guides for how and where to start reading.

Another series that doesn't have much to do with dragons or kingdoms, yet is the perfect example of "binge-able," Ferrante's four-parter chronicles the life of frenemies Lenu and Lila, two Italian women born to poor families in Naples. The books follow the characters through all the twists and turns of their life from childhood to old age, and manage to feel like they sum up all of life. Once you start the first novel, My Brilliant Friend, you won't be able to put them down.

Octavia Butler's four Patternist novels—a fifth, Survivor, was disowned by the author—stretch from ancient Egypt to a future dystopian world where telepaths struggle with an alien disease. It's an epic series in every sense of the word, using science-fiction and fantasy tropes to examine issues of race, gender, power, and what it means to be human. It is also one of the few series that is better read chronologically—starting with Wild Seed, one of the greatest sci-fi and fantasy novels of all time—rather than the publication order.

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Season seven of Game of Thrones premieres on Sunday, July 17.