Together with A Song of Ice and Fire its called the new Masterpiece of Fantasy. Only that George RR Martin is more famous now. In my opinion, Steven Erikson Books are far superior to ASoIaF. I like booth, but while Martin lost me a bit in Volume 4 and 5, Erikson had planed Volume 1-10 in coherency, forshadowing events sometimes 5 Novels in advance, so a lot of fans, including me, reread the novels several times and still find new angles of the story. You never have the feeling the outhor just popup new characters for nonsense, and the story is truly epic. But its hard to get into the story fast, its written completly in Medias Res, so you ahve to figure things out a lot. And I recommed you to read it in German, if your english is not perfect. It was very well translated. But the last 4 german Volumes (2 english) are still not translated.

The first book is Garden of the Moon