Love Outlander? 5 More Epic Series to Get Lost In

Thump. What was that? The whole house shook!

If you’re a fan of Diana Gabaldon’s epic Outlander series, that was probably the sound of your copy of Written in My Own Heart’s Blood dropping onto your porch. The massive volume—over 800 pages of teeny-tiny print, adding up to around 420,000 words—mean it will surely be one of the longest books to top best-seller lists this year.

But that’s what fans love about Outlander: the ability to fully immerse themselves in the misty Scottish moors alongside Claire and Jamie, and stay there for a long, long time. “MOBY,” as fans affectionately call it, isn’t even the longest book in the series (book five, The Fiery Cross, tops half a million words, by the author’s own estimate), and the saga has grown more popular with each book as new fans pick up the story of a 20th-century woman mysteriously cast back in time to Scotland in the 1700s.

Of course, for the right kind of reader, an intimidatingly lengthy series is a feature, not a bug. We don’t want to leave the worlds we love. We polish off a few million words and ask for more. We look at that towering stack of matching paperbacks like starving orphans who have just wandered into a fully stocked supermarket, finally convinced our hunger will be sated.

If this describes you, here are 5 more door-stopping series to lose yourself inside:

Series: Earth’s Children, by Jean M. Auel
Start with: The Clan of the Cave Bear
Total word count: 1.5 million
Published between 1980 and 2011, this six-book series hits many of the same buttons as Outlander, transporting readers into the past (way, way into the past) and building an enduring story on the solid foundation of a strong, captivating female protagonist—in this case, Ayla, a modern “Cro-Magnon” human living among a tribe of Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago. Though fans debate the merits of the later books, each hefty installment topped the sales charts, proving that sometimes readers just want to visit their old haunts one more time.

Series: A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin
Start with: A Game of Thrones
Total word count: 1.8 million and growing
The series that, these days, needs no introduction, though not long ago it was only faithful readers of fantasy (no strangers to hefty tomes, as you’ll see below) who knew about the transporting qualities of Martin’s exhaustive exploration of the various schemers, heroes, despots, victims, and dragons that populate the magic-tinged world of Westeros. Already one of the longest series ever published, only five of a projected seven books have been released, and we’ve probably got at least a million more words to go before all is said and done.

Series: The Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson
Start with: Gardens of the Moon
Total word count: 3.3 million
If The Lord of the Rings is Fantasy 101, then the Malazan series is a 400-level master class. Packed with thousands of named characters and intricately woven plot threads that span continents and decades, with amoral heroes and fallen gods and every action colored in shades of gray, it’s a series you won’t want to tackle until a host of other books have trained you how to read the genre. And even then, experienced genre buffs insist that you won’t really start to grasp it until your second (or third!) read-through.

Series: Kushiel’s Legacy, by Jacqueline Carey
Start with: Kushiel’s Dart
Total word count: 1.5 million
Carey’s six-book series is wonderfully hard to classify, a potent mix of romance, magic, sex, fantasy, and alternate history with a fan base that spans typical genre divides. The first three books explore the political machinations that shape the destiny of Phèdre nó Delaunay, a gifted courtesan in Terre d’Ange, an alternate version of France where religious prostitution is one of the foundations of the culture. Much of the story focuses on the push and pull of her romance with Joscelin Verreuil, her taciturn bodyguard, setting the stage for the next three books, which jump ahead to focus on the couple’s son. Though not officially a part of the Kushiel series, the three books in the slightly shorter Moirin Trilogypick up the tale 100 years later.

Series: The Dark Tower, by Stephen King
Start with: The Gunslinger
Total word count: 1.4 million (at minimum)
The eight books that chronicle the quest of Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of Gilead, to reach the mystical Dark Tower and confront the mystery of his world’s unraveling is surely Stephen King’s magnum opus. Not only is it back with some of the most memorable characters and set-pieces of the writer’s storied career (you’ll certainly never look at The Little Engine that Could the same way after reading The Waste Lands), it also builds a mythology that suggests that the series encompasses, often explicitly, not just many of King’s other novels, but every book ever written. Get reading.

What’s your favorite epic series?