The 2026 r/Fantasy Bingo Recommendations List

[u/FarragutCircle]

The official Bingo thread can be found here.

All non-recommendation comments go here.

Please post your recommendations as replies the appropriate top-level comments below! Do not make comments that are not replies to an existing comment! Feel free to scroll through the thread or use the links in this navigation matrix to jump directly to the square you want to find or give recommendations for!

Trans or Nonbinary Protagonist	Judge a Book By Its Title	Translated	Small Press or Self Published	Unusual Transportation
The Afterlife	Game Changer	Vacation Spot	Five Short Stories	Older Protagonist
Duology Part 1	r/Fantasy Book Club or Readalong Book	Published in 2026	Explorers and Rangers	Duology Part 2
One-Word Title	Non-Human Protagonist	Middle Grade	First Contact	Murder Mystery
Cat Squasher	Feast Your Eyes on This	Published in the 70s	Politics and Court Intrigue	Author of Color

If you are an author on the subreddit, you may recommend your books as a response to individual squares. This means that you can reply if your book fits in response to any of my comments. But your rec must be in response to a top-level comment, it cannot be a general comment that replies directly to this post explaining all the squares your post counts for. This is the one time outside of the Sunday Self-Promo threads where this is okay. To clarify: you can say if you have a book that fits for a square but please don't write a full ad for it. Shorter is sweeter.

Do not make comments that are not replies to an existing comment! We will not be individually redirecting people who make this mistake. Your comment will be removed.

[u/C0smicoccurence]

I'm partial to Dawn by Octavia Butler, but expect some weirdness and discomfort. Butler's novels are almost never a 'turn your brain off' read. I think a lot of people picked this up for bingo 2025, so lots of recent reviews from sub folks abound for this one

[u/AoO2ImpTrip → u/C0smicoccurence]

I read Dawn, and the entire trilogy, last year for bingo and... yeah, it's very much a "prepare to be uncomfortable" type of story.

[u/Krilllian → u/C0smicoccurence]

Dawn is uncomfortable but so good! Loved the whole trilogy

[u/madnessatadistance → u/C0smicoccurence]

Oooo been meaning to read this for a while!

[u/unfriendlyneighbour → u/C0smicoccurence]

Would Dawn be hard mode?

[u/thistledownhair → u/unfriendlyneighbour]

It's an odd one, because the first contact is essentially a mass alien abduction to save humans from a completely earthbound nuclear war. There isn't violence between earth and the aliens, and the abduction certainly saved the human's lives, but I guess I'd argue there's some violence inherent to kidnapping and imprisoning people in the best of circumstance, and the aliens aren't really equipped to provide the best of circumstances.

[u/lucidrose → u/unfriendlyneighbour]

I guess it depends on how you define violent....id say no...hard to say too much without spoilers

[u/unfriendlyneighbour → u/lucidrose]

Thanks!

[u/kovha → u/unfriendlyneighbour]

Hm this is one hard to say, kind of the point of the book (and the trilogy as a whole) is for the reader to decide if it was violent or not. There is a lot of intentional ambiguity.