There are so many sub-genres out there …
The Goblin Emperor (2014) by Katherine Addison is clear fantasy, set in a world of elves, goblins, and mixed offspring of the two. But it is what might be called something like “high court fantasy,” focused on the unexpected elevation of a 4th son (meaning, fourth in line for the throne), a half-breed to boot, to the role of Emperor of the Elven kingdom.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, but the recommendation comes with some caveats. First, most, if your taste runs to the swashbuckling, action/adventure side, this may not be a great match. This book is about rumors and intrigue, court politics, sabotage, and a murder mystery. A lot happens, but there isn’t a lot of physical action.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s not a particularly nuanced book. The society discussed is frightfully patriarchal, and other than that being explicitly recognized, there’s not a lot of attention paid to alternate strategies of agency or to female resistance (there’s some, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all very recognizable from contemporary portrayals of female agency in the 18th (ish) century). More problematically, the notion of race is both ubiquitous and under-developed: what it means to be mixed race is central to the story, but also treated somewhat superficially.
Still, the world is nicely built, and Addison does a great job creating empathy for the protagonist, doing so both by describing how lost and unprepared they are for their role and by never losing sight of some of their central competencies and their moral compass. You root for them to succeed, and you genuinely feel the risk of their failure.
There are some other books written in this world, but The Goblin Emperor stands alone as a novel (as such, I’ve written it up here, instead of waiting until I’ve completed a trilogy or whatever). I do plan to read at least one of the others, although it may be a while (the pile is deep at the moment).