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Oh if you can find a good translation[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_the_Condor_Heroes](Legend of Condor Heroes) is an amazing Chinese fantasy saga. If you like wuxia you will love these books. And while they are fantasy many of the characters and all of the locations are real. Seriously I can’t recommend this series enough.
I think I have an annotated version I can send to you, the cultural notes really help.
Malazan Book of the Fallen is best fantasy series I’ve read. It take fantasy tropes and breaks them. It’s written by a guy that studied sociology and anthropology, and it shows in his civilizations/races. It contains a smattering of anti-capitalt talk, and wrestles with the idea of imperialism.
China Meiville’s Bas Lag trilogy. Lots of left wing thought, guy clearly knows his left wing politics (little details like the revolutionaries bickering over the finer details of the Toil theory of value etc) and he’s managed to do what so few fantasy writers have ever accomplished; the many, various sapient species feel like alien but consistent other peoples and not a crudely chucked together bundle of tropes/stand ins for human ethnic groups.
The Iconoclasts trilogy by Mike Shel is an excellent new series, although only two books are out thus far. Kind of a mix of horror, thriller, and fantasy, with a terrifying immortal ruler, evil gods, undead monsters, and a generally very tense mood overall. Not the kind of thing you can immerse yourself in (not for long, anyway–it’s both not long enough and too compelling for that), but very much worth the read IMO.
Oh, I got another: The Powder Mage books.
Doing gunpowder rails gives some people magic gun powers, so they do a liberalism and overthrew the king. The old power structure doesn’t like this, which includes a bunch of powerful classical mages (the Privileged) and every neighboring country. The subsequent trilogy is better than the first and moves the action to the old kingdom’s imperial quagmire where some imperialism is about to get tipped on its side from several directions.
It also has a sequel series, so there’s six decently long books to read. Definitely one of the coolest magic systems out there. To expand a bit on how it works: gunpowder is basically a drug, as mentioned, but powder mages can also burn gunpowder near them and redirect the force thereby generated as they like, so they can make a bunch of powder explode next to them and direct the blast away from themselves, for example, and one character can fire a bullet and make it shoot much farther than it could ordinarily go by expending powder on his person and using the force from it to push on the bullet.
