Best Modern Fantasy (Nominations Needed)

Image description:
Prince of Thorns book cover
by Mark Lawrence

What is the best book (or series) written in the fantasy genre in the last 25 years?  

Back when this blog was young, I did a best sci/fi or fantasy poll and even with only twenty readers, I somehow ended up in a seven part poll with over a hundred nominations, so I've spent a lot of time trying to break those genres into smaller subsets for the purposes of running a poll that didn't take months.  A year and change ago I was doing best classic sci fi, best modern sci fi, best stand alone sci fi, best stand alone fantasy, best sci fi series, best fantasy series, best classic fantasy...

But I somehow forgot best modern fantasy. So here we go.


Rules- 

1- As always, I leave the semantics about "fantasy" to your best judgement because I'd rather be inclusive. I might arch an eyebrow at your ridiculous stretch to get, but I'm not going to argue.

2- To avoid multi-decade spanning series being on our poll because an author tossed out a recent sequel, the book OR FIRST BOOK IN THE SERIES must have a copyright date no earlier than 1992. If your series kicked off in the eighties, you'll have to pick one book (that came later) to nominate.

3- You may nominate two (2) works of modern fantasy. Remember that I am a terrifying megalomaniac who hates free will and all things that smell like liberty.  I will NOT take any books or series beyond the second that you suggest. (I will consider everything after your second rec in a long list to be "seconds" if the work is nominated before or after yours.)

3- You may (and should) second as many nominations of others as you wish. That is the only way they'll be making it to the final poll.

4- Please put your nominations here. I will take nominations on reminder posts; however, they may not get the seconds you need to go onto our poll because no one will see them. But I can't sift through all the social media cross posting. (Seriously, Deloris Umbridge got a nomination on our best villain poll, but she received no seconds because she was nominated on Facebook instead of here. And then everyone got sad that she wasn't on the polls–though she probably should have been.)

5- You are nominating WRITTEN WORKS, not their movie portrayals. CGI epic fights might be very pretty, but if you found Game of Thrones to be too dense a read (I didn't, but just by way of example), you shouldn't nominate it because Kit Harrington rocks a tux.

6- "Best" means whatever you as a reader think it should. Most challenging. Most engaging. Most fun. Most literary. It's up to you what "best" means.