Conan Books in Order

Before The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan cut his teeth writing new adventures for Conan the Barbarian. These novels are set in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age and can be read in almost any order; each one is a complete sword‑and‑sorcery romp with its own villain, city, and mess for Conan to fight his way out of.

In Conan the Invincible he crosses a treacherous necromancer and the demon he serves, getting drawn into a war between rival sorcerers. Conan The Defender drops him into the middle of a plot to topple the king of Nemedia, where a magic‑forged sword and a living statue complicate every back‑alley conspiracy. Conan the Unconquered pits him against an ambitious wizard raising an army of the dead and sending deadly assassins after anyone who gets in the way.

Conan the Triumphant and Conan the Magnificent lean into cults, monsters, and cursed relics—Conan leading a free company into a succession crisis in Ophir in one, and stalking a dragon and a fanatical priesthood in the other. In Conan the Victorious, he heads east to Vendhya, racing both poison and demon‑guarded tombs. Conan the Destroyer adapts the second Conan film, sending him and a small band of allies in search of a gem and a horn that can wake a slumbering god, with the expected betrayals and monstrous interruptions.

Jordan respects Howard’s original vision—Conan is still the hard‑headed, sharp‑eyed Cimmerian who trusts his sword more than any wizard—but he layers in his own touches. Supporting characters tend to have a bit more shading, cities feel like real places with politics and street life, and the action scenes are choreographed so you can see where every blade and arrow lands.

The stakes are usually personal rather than cosmic. Conan is trying to stay alive, get paid, free someone from a dungeon, or stop a sorcerer before the wrong city ends up enslaved or eaten. There’s plenty of blood and the occasional lurid cult, but also tavern banter, stubborn mercenary loyalty, and the sense that the world keeps turning no matter how big the current threat looks.

Most volumes stand alone, so you can read them in publication order, by mood, or by whichever title grabs you first.

For Wheel of Time readers, these books show an earlier, leaner Jordan: fewer points of view, more fistfights and dungeon crawls, but the same enjoyment of invented history and of watching characters improvise under pressure. They’re good palate cleansers between massive tomes or a fun way to see where some of his love for magic‑versus‑steel storytelling began.