Recommendations from our site
“It’s about magic coming back into England at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It is about a wizard and his apprentice and the apprentice’s wife, and various other people that they know, and an enslaved person and fairies, and all these people’s interaction with the other – as over and over again, she brings us more otherness.” Read more...
The Best Fairy Books for Adults
Jo Walton, Novelist
“This really is one of my all-time favourite novels – it’s possibly my favourite novel by a living person…Strange and Norrell have opposing ideas about what magic should be and where it comes from. Norrell is a moderniser: magic is a tool, it’s useful, but we shouldn’t get any dark academic ideas about it. Jonathan Strange is all dark academia: he wants to follow magic’s roots back into the past and into the fairy world, back to this mysterious figure named John Uskglass, the father of English magic.” Read more...
Lev Grossman, Novelist
“I chose this book because it really blurs the line between fiction and history. Just the use of footnotes and references to texts that likely don’t exist yet unless Susanna Clarke writes them in!” Read more...
Tendai Huchu, Novelist
“It’s a magic that feels absolutely real, as if the book were an eyewitness account. Not since Lewis has the supernatural been such a thrilling, immediate, concrete presence on the page. It’s no accident that I began The Magicians in 2004 – Strange is the book that woke me up to the power of the new fantasy. Read it, and you may be woken up too.” Read more...
Lev Grossman, Novelist
