I'd recommend the Gormenghast Trilogy as well as David Gemmell's Drenai and Rigante series.
The Dragon Griaule for something slightly different.
Summaries of the above:
Rigante
The Rigante series is a series of four heroic fantasy novels written by
David Gemmell. They are centered around the
Rigante clan of the
Keltoi people, clearly inspired by the highlanders of Scotland. In the first novel
Sword in the Storm and its direct sequel
Midnight Falcon, the Rigante face the expanding empire of Stone (analogous to the real-world Roman Empire). The next two novels,
Ravenheart and
Stormrider, are set much further in the future with the new enemy being the Varlish (analogous to the English).
The overarching theme of the series is the endurance of a proud culture, rich with magic and a closeness to nature, that is at risk of being lost due to the encroachment of "civilisation".
Drenai
The Drenai series or Drenai Saga is a series of eleven heroic fantasy novels written by
David Gemmell. The books are set in the fictional
Drenai world first introduced in Gemmell's debut novel,
Legend. While the primary focus of the series is on the
Drenai people, other races including the
Nadir,
Ventrians,
Vagrians and Nashaanites also feature prominently in the novels.
The Drenai series does not progress linearly but rather focuses on various important moments and characters over a span of many hundreds of years. Thus, the publishing order of the novels does not match the chronological order of the events depicted in the books. Often however, the main characters in one novel will be descendants or ancestors of characters from another novel, with the (intersecting and diverging) lines of Drenai
Earls of Bronze and that of the
Nadir Uniters providing many of the series' main characters.
Three separate sub-series, each centred around a particular protagonist, operate within the larger Drenai meta-series. The
Waylander series (3 books) is chronologically the earliest and follows the life of the assassin Dakeyras, better known as
Waylander. The
Druss the Legend series (4 books) follow the adventures of Drenai hero
Druss, introduced in Gemmell's first book. Lastly,
The Damned is a subseries consisting of two novels focusing on the Nashaanite swordsman
Olek Skilgannon.
White Wolf, the first book of
The Damned, is also considered a part of the Druss the Legend series.
Three Drenai novels –
The King Beyond the Gate,
Quest for Lost Heroes and
Winter Warriors – do not belong to any particular subseries.
Dragon Griaule
More than twenty-five years ago, Lucius Shepard introduced us to a remarkable fictional world, a world separated from our own "by the thinnest margin of possibility." There, in the mythical Carbonales Valley, Shepard found the setting for "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," the classic account of an artist—Meric Cattanay—and his decades long effort to paint—and kill—a dormant, not quite dead dragon measuring 6,000 feet from end to end. The story was nominated for multiple awards and is now recognized as one of its author's signature accomplishments.
Over the years, Shepard has revisited this world in a number of brilliant, independent narratives that have illuminated the Dragon's story from a variety of perspectives. This loosely connected series reached a dramatic crossroads in the astonishing novella, "The Taborin Scale".
The Dragon Griaule now gathers all of these hard to find stories into a single generous volume. The capstone of the book—and a particular treat for Shepard fans—is "The Skull," a new 40,000 word novel that advances the story in unexpected ways, connecting the ongoing saga of an ancient and fabulous beast with the political realities of Central America in the 21st century. Augmented by a group of engaging, highly informative story notes,
The Dragon Griaule is an indispensable volume, the work of a master stylist with a powerful—and always unpredictable—imagination
The Gormenghast Trilogy
A doomed lord, an emergent hero, and a dazzling array of bizarre creatures inhabit the magical world of the Gormenghast novels which, along with Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings, reign as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. At the center of it all is the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom, unless the conniving Steerpike, who is determined to rise above his menial position and control the House of Groan, has his way.
In these extraordinary novels, Peake has created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, and vivid. Accompanying the text are Peake's own drawings, illustrating the whole assembly of strange and marvelous creatures that inhabit Gormenghast.
