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To start, I love sagas/epics. (Many) long books that show so much character development are my jam. My favorites include Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Clan of the Cave Bear. My only problem is that I'm finally finishing up with Clan of the Cave Bear and need more recommendations. Can anyone help me out? Not looking for YA books, but would love to find a new series or book to keep me interested for a while.

I don't know if you can call it an epic, but the Warramunga series by Greg Kater has been getting great reviews. It's about two Australian soldiers and WWII and its aftermath. If you want lighter stuff, try the Magi Charter series by Jordan David about .

The "Daughter of Smoke and Bone" trilogy by Laini Taylor, are really good. It's classed as a YA but definitely doesn't read like one (Bar maybe the first couple of chapters). It is beautifully written, the character development is amazing, the characters in general are so well fleshed out. It is a fantasy series, and the books are pretty hefty but it's well worth a read!

I highly recommend Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy (though actually I think there are five books - the original three, and then two more LeGuin wrote later). It's high fantasy, and as a fellow lover of Tolkien, I really enjoyed them. There are wizards and their familiars, dragons, boats, magic, friendship, sacrifice, and the struggle against darkness. Names and language are important, as they are in Tolkien's works. The second book is my favorite, but all of them are amazing. LeGuin also has some amazing sci-fi books that I'd recommend - I'm not personally a huge sci-fi fan, but I do really love LeGuin's. It has enough fantasy mixed in to keep my fantasy-loving soul quite happy, but it also contains the more sciency parts, with time and space travel, advanced technological societies, and so forth.

I recently loved the Pendragon Cycle by Stephen Lawhead. It follows the legend of King Arthur but starts long before his birth.

Lawhead takes a few liberties with the legend but he actually studied Celtic mythology so it’s well done. I’m not particularly into Celtic mythology but it’s so beautifully written that I got completely caught up in it.

Several of the books in the series made me cry!

The author leans quite heavily into the Christianity of the characters so I’d avoid it if that’s likely to bother you. It’s by far one of the best fantasy-esque series I’ve ever read though.