Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings Reading Order: All 16 Books

Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings is one of the great long fantasy sagas: sixteen novels across five connected series, written over more than twenty years. It's also a saga where readers are constantly tempted to skip ahead to the books about Fitz. This guide lays out the full order and explains why the "side" series are worth your time.

The Full Reading Order

Read the saga in publication order, which is also the order the story unfolds in.

Where to Start

Start with the Farseer Trilogy. Assassin's Apprentice introduces FitzChivalry Farseer, a royal bastard trained as an assassin, and his complicated friendship with the Fool. It's slow and intimate rather than action-packed, and that's the point: Hobb's strength is character, and the payoff of this saga depends on how well you come to know these people.

Can You Skip the Liveship Traders?

It's the most common question, and our answer is no. The Liveship Traders moves to a new region, the trading city of Bingtown, with a new cast and no Fitz, and many readers end up loving it most of all. More importantly, the later Fitz books draw on its events, and one familiar character's story becomes much richer once you've read it. Skipping it saves a few weeks and costs a lot of meaning.

The Rain Wild Chronicles: The Weak Link?

The Rain Wild Chronicles is the most divisive part of the saga. It follows a group of young misfits escorting newly hatched dragons up a river, and it's gentler and slower than the rest. Even so, it shapes the state of the world's dragons and their lost cities, and Fitz and the Fool draws on both. If your patience runs short, read it briskly, but don't skip it outright.

Fitz and the Fool: The Ending

The final trilogy returns to Fitz decades later and pulls threads from all four earlier series together. It's an emotional finale, and it hits hardest if you've read everything before it. See our Fitz and the Fool reading order for that trilogy on its own.

How Long Will It Take?

These are long books. The Farseer Trilogy alone is about 40 hours at our standard pace of 50 pages an hour, and the full sixteen-book saga runs well past 200 hours. Most readers take it one trilogy at a time, with other books in between. That's a perfectly good way to read Hobb, since each sub-series has a natural ending.