Cozy Fantasy for the Long Dark

As we settle in and prepare for the Long Dark in Seattle, grab a mug of your favorite tea, your coziest blanket, and cuddle up with these low stakes, high comfort fantasy reads.

Regional author and audio book narrator extraordinaire Travis Baldree made an unexpected splash in the fantasy market with his first novel Legends & Lattes, but he recently gifted readers more time with Viv the bookish orc mercenary in the follow-up prequel Bookshops & Bonedust. Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea offers another take on the warrior who just wants to hang up her sword and drink tea in peace. Reyna and Kianthe’s adventures continue in A Pirate’s Life For Tea.

Lest the cozy fantasy genre be in danger of taking itself too seriously already, Morgan Stang’s The Bookshop and the Barbarian takes delightful pot-shots at the genre’s conventions for a sweet, low-key story about a barbarian warrior who finds an unexpected home in a bookshop.

An essential element of the cozy fantasy genre is the home or the hearth. In Delemhach’s House Witch trilogy, mysterious cook Fin is quite content to make delicious food for the Daxarian royal court with Kraken, his kitten familiar, but soon finds himself tangled up in all sorts of palace intrigues. In A Coup of Tea, Casey Blair tells the story of a princess in exile who just wants to run her little magical tea shop in peace, but of course finds herself swept up in the intrigues of her chosen home. (If you really enjoy A Coup of Tea and want to read more, put in a “Suggest a Title” request for the rest of the Tea Princess Chronicles series!)

Author TJ Klune deserves special mention as an originator of the genre (along with the late great Terry Pratchett) with the publication of the beloved and beautifully crafted House in the Cerulean Sea. Klune’s latest stand alone In the Lives of the Puppets revisits the story of Pinocchio in a heartwarming tale of robots and found family. And speaking of found families, Mika Moon and the residents of Nowhere House in Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is one of my personal favorites.

Find these titles and more cozy fantasy reads here.

~V.