Best book to begin the Warhammer 40K universe?

tons of great places to start, some suggestions:

Eisenhorn series - spectacular, focuses on inquisitor and his retinue, get a good sampling of his interactions with various races

Gaunt's Ghosts - more standard military sci fi, focusing on a commissar and his unit

Ciaphas Cain - a more action adventure along with some comedy (which is slightly rare in 40k) again focusing on a commissar

Any of the space marine battles / anthologies can be good depending on which faction(s) you like.

Are you more interested in 'good' factions, evil factions? regular humans and their struggles or space marines / aliens etc?

Its a fantastic universe with tons of variety

If you want to go hardcore and get a good idea of the basis of the current events, you can start the horus heresy novels, which are currently running about 60 deep I think, they focus around the huge imperial civil war that took place 10,000 years before the 'current' timeline so ~30k

historical = horus heresy novels, they start off with the story of the primarchs, the original space marine legions and the huge civil war that led to the events that are happening in the main 40k novels.

The Eisenhorn and Ravenor series also have a ton of detail on imperial politics as well as just being fantastic books in general.

If you don't want to get bogged down with 55+ books in the Horus Heresy, I really don't think you can go wrong with Eisenhorn.

Also if you see any of these names as authors, you have a pretty damn good shot that the book is a good one:

Dan Abnett, Graham McNeill, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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Thanks for the advice. I think I'll start with the Horus series since it seems to explain the history of everything.

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Good luck…it’s only around 70 books long. Hahaha.


I’d recommend the Gaunt’s Ghosts books, and most things by Dan Abnett.

They’re somewhat new, but I’ve really enjoyed the low-level books under the “Warhammer Crime” imprint.

I 2nd Gaunt's ghosts. I want to say it's like 12 books but It's a nice different perspective from the Space Marines.

Didn't wanna start my own thread so bumping this old one but im about 12-15 books into 40k stuff and wanted to find some good recs

I loved Krieg. Really good story on the Death Korps origins.

Read the uriel ventris ultramarines series which was pretty good.

Devastation of Baal was good and I heard Dante was solid but I guess I jumped ahead in that trilogy by mistake.

Im doing the Cane series now cause people said it was funny and thats been true thru like 4 books so far. Dude basically fails his way forward trying to save his own arse and keeps getting clout for being seemingly super brave.

If anybody has any others they liked alot I'd love to hear about it. I like stories about the Tyranids alot. Those have kinda stood out.

I would watch a youtube overview video of the W40K universe (google Bricky 40k faction). This will give you a good frame of reference for the 40K universe.

The first books I started was the Horus Heresy but I had already played several W40K computer games by then. So I already had some knowledge of the universe.

I'd recommend starting with the Eisenhorn novels. Supposedly Eisenhorn was being looked at for tv/movie adaptation before the Henry Cavill involvement.

As others have said anything written by Abnett is good.