Some of the best adventure fiction isn't about defeating a dark lord — it's about the strange, small, human reasons people set off into the unknown.

Every so often a friend tells me they don't like fantasy, and I have to resist the urge to argue. Usually what they mean is that they don't like a specific idea of fantasy — the one with the maps, the prophecies, the swords with names, the farm boy who turns out to be a king. That's a real subgenre, and it's fine if it's not their thing. But it's not the whole genre, and it's a shame when people write off everything under the umbrella because of one flavor they tried and didn't enjoy.

So here's a short list of fantasy for people who think they don't like fantasy. None of these require you to care about dragons, chosen ones, or saving the world. What they require is an interest in people, in places, and in the strange ways those two things can interact.

Start With the Strange and the Familiar

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is a good place to begin. It's short, it's strange, it's set in a house that is also a world, and it reads more like a literary mystery than a fantasy epic. If you liked the atmosphere of a book like The Secret History but wanted something more mysterious, this is your entry point.

Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus is another common gateway. It's a love story wrapped in a magical competition, and its appeal is mostly aesthetic — the prose, the atmosphere, the sense of being somewhere beautiful and slightly unreal. If you like descriptive writing and slow-burn romance, the fantasy elements will feel like a feature rather than a hurdle.

For something with more edge, try V.E. Schwab's A Darker Shade of Magic, which is set in multiple versions of London and reads like historical adventure with a supernatural twist. Or Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, which is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin that reads more like a fairy tale for adults than a fantasy novel.

Look for Books That Wear the Genre Lightly

Some of the best gateway fantasy is fantasy that doesn't announce itself. Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant is a novel about memory and grief that happens to have a dragon in it. Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is a romance that uses time travel as a device rather than a genre. If you're not sure whether you like fantasy, look for books that use fantastical elements as tools rather than as the whole point.

The other thing to look for is tone. A lot of people who bounce off fantasy do so because the tone is too earnest, too serious, too invested in its own worldbuilding. Try something funny instead — Terry Pratchett, obviously, but also T. Kingfisher, whose books are wry and warm and never take themselves too seriously. Or try something quiet, like The House in the Cerulean Sea, which is basically a cozy story about found family that happens to have magical children in it.

The genre is wider than its reputation suggests. If you've been avoiding it, you might just have been avoiding the wrong corner of it.