March's recommendation: the series A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin. Individual titles published so far are A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords. Yet to be published are A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons, and two more books whose titles are unknown.
I'd be lying if I said these books weren't epic fantasy, but if you're the sort of person who's turned off by epic fantasy, don't make any snap judgements just yet. These books are not Tolkien clones, and anybody who says they are is doing them a grave injustice. Just because the books are fat and the series is long does not mean they're the same old same old.
For one thing, the standard Light vs. Dark polarity stereotypically associated with epic fantasy is not here. If there is a polarity in the books, it's of heat versus cold -- but even then, it's not half so straightforward as it usually is. The lurking bad guys, the Others, are cold -- but so are our heroes, the Stark family. Daenerys, associated with dragons and heat, cannot be neatly slotted into a good-guy slot or a bad-guy one, and neither, surprisingly, can Melisandre, who serves a god of fire and light. Martin isn't interested in those kinds of simplistic divisions.
The lack of simplicity really shows up in the politics. Forget Aragorn, waltzing into Gondor and taking over because he's the Rightful King. Westeros rapidly becomes embroiled in what can really best be described as a giant political clusterfuck, wherein the characters and factions and so on behave much as real people and factions and so on historically behaved -- Martin isn't interested in giving you watered-down quasi-medievalism any more than he's interested in giving you easy polarities.
Describing a series this complex makes it hard to decide how to approach recommending it; I think I'll back up and give you some plot. Except that it's hard to do that without giving away spoilers for the first book (or the later ones). Damn Martin for having things actually happen in the plot. :-)
Westeros looks like a stretched-out version of Britain, and in the far north there's a Wall built of ice. To the north of the Wall, there be, not dragons, but the Others -- creepy, cold beings we still, three books into the series, don't know much about. It reminds me a little of Daniel Keyes Moran, with the second plotline that only occasionally pokes its head through. The men of the Night's Watch, who maintain the Wall, know something bad's going on up there, but nobody's listening to them. The Watch has lost most of its prestige and power, and the people to the south are busy with their own problems. Which produces in me a desire to take all the other characters by the shoulders and shake them, screaming "This doesn't matter! Look north, you morons, or you're all going to die!"
Some people are looking north, kind of. Westeros has an extremely odd climate, wherein Summer can last for a decade or more; it's had a very long Summer, but that's coming to an end. And the Starks of Winterfell, a noble family from the north, know it. Their motto: Winter is coming. They are the heroes of this series, more or less (less in the case of Sansa; I want to beat her head in), and if anybody wakes up in time to the real danger it'll be them. But they're tangled up in the politics of Westeros the same as everybody else is, and besides which -- well, I shouldn't tell you that bit. ;-)
There are three things I particularly respect about this series. One is the complexity and realism of the politics, and of the world that supports the politics. No blandly pretty setting here; there are actual peasants, who produce actual food, and when the peasants' fields get burned then people don't have food. There are consequences to having a big war that drags on and on. Second, and related to this -- in that there are very real consequences, when Martin's at the writing wheel -- is that he has no compunctions whatsoever about gacking characters. It's a bit of a spoiler to tell you that, since it'll mean that you'll be keeping an eye out for who's going to die, but I doubt you'll spot all of them coming. Three books in, I've finally got a theory for predicting who's at risk of dying; I intend to field-test it in the next book. But don't assume that just because somebody's important means they're safe. They're not. Martin will kill anybody, I swear to god.
The third thing I admire is a little harder to explain. One thing I adore about fantasy is the sense of the numinous, those moments when the story transcends everyday reality . . . but at the same time, I get annoyed by authors who just forget about reality altogether. I like a certain amount of what I think of as anthropological realism; I may not want the author to tell me exactly who's raising the food and how trade works and so on, but I want to believe that they could tell me if I asked. Martin achieves this; I get a sense of concrete reality out of Westeros that I frankly just don't get out of Middle-Earth.
But he manages to do it without losing the numinous. Most of the time, Westeros is a very low-magic setting -- but when the magic punches through . . . the Others are creepy. Melisandre is creepy. The stuff Daenerys goes through is awesome and weird. The weirwoods -- I wish I'd thought those up. Martin uses these elevated moments sparingly, but because of that, they keep their power. They don't become everyday and ordinary through overuse. And the story is gradually moving toward a point where the forces that peek through at those moments will be facing off against one another, and if he can maintain the power of the effect, it's going to be incredible.
But he has to finish writing the damn series first. <sigh> Well, don't wait for him to do so. Start reading today.