“Stephen Brust is an amazing fantasy writer…It’s a book about a conspiracy to do good things in the world, a conspiracy to make other people happy…Conspiracies play a large place in noir. Often, the thing that’s being unwound by the noir protagonist is a conspiracy. In this case, the noir protagonist is the conspiracist. He’s part of a conspiracy, and it is in the nature of conspiracies that they often contain conspiracies of their own…What really conveys the noir flavor, as with all of Brust’s work, is his impeccable, absolutely brilliant, dry, noir voice. It’s funny, it’s wry, it’s understated. He is a genius in every way. The language is delicious, and the dialogue and the characters are great. You want to be around a bar with this group of characters.” Read more...

The Best Noir Crime Thrillers

Cory Doctorow, Novelist

“This is an urban fantasy series about a coyote shapeshifter named Mercy Thompson. She works as a mechanic in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state. These books initially straddle the line between open magic and secret magic. The fae are the only-non human group that is currently ‘out’ as the series starts, but there are also vampires, werewolves, witches, and other magic creatures going bump in the night, so to speak. Mercy is a mechanic, both literally and figuratively speaking. She fixes cars—primarily Volkswagens—and solves paranormal problems between the various factions in this Tri-Cities area. In the first book, Mercy helps a werewolf who shows up at her shop looking for work. It turns out he is being chased by evil people who want to run experiments on him.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“In The City & the City there is a supernatural force that comes in and yanks people out of reality if they break the rules of the mutually agreed upon imperception of the overlapping cities. It’s completely ridiculous, but Miéville builds the entire world around it…The basic idea is that you’ve got these two warring factions within a city. It’s been decades, maybe hundreds of years, but at some point the two different factions within the city had a treaty and they agreed to coexist and continue living in the same city. But they agreed to never, never pay attention to each other. So the citizens are part of the same physical world, but they live in two different perceptual worlds. They share the same roads, they live in the same buildings, but they have all agreed not to pay attention to each other. That active not-paying-attention is actually active. If you’re driving down a road and you have to swerve around a car that belongs to a citizen of the other faction, you cannot reflect upon, or even think about, why you just swerved round. You have to trick yourself into thinking that you moved out of the way not to actively avoid something, but just because.” Read more...

The best books on Surrealism and the Brain

Bradley Voytek, Medical Scientist

“It’s urban fantasy, but it isn’t secret magic, where everyone has to keep the magic hidden. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of Atlanta, which is where I live now. These books are set in a contemporary world, but one where magic suddenly came back into this world of technology after thousands of years of being dormant. There was a cataclysmic event, and society crumbled and then recovered. Technology still exists, but it alternates with magic, in waves. One will work and the other won’t. That’s a fun complication. People have learned to live with the mess that this causes. A car may have two engines: a gas engine and a magic engine, or some people ride horses instead because they don’t want to have to deal with it. Compared to our world, it’s more dangerous because you have shapeshifters, vampires controlled by necromancers, mages, witches, and monsters. The monsters range from low-key nuisances to the extremely nasty, people-eating kind.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“For me, this is the best of Gaiman’s books and I’ve got all of them. It’s set in the present time and talks about settlers who have settled a continent and have brought their gods with them. So, if you are Swedish and you cherish Nordic gods and move to the US, the gods go with you and the more you believe in them the stronger they are. But if fewer people start believing in them then they get weaker and eventually they become mortal and die. So, it’s about all these forgotten gods. It’s a horror story in which nobody dies. It’s a metaphor for our society – if you replace gods with values then you get the same thing.” Read more...

The best books on How to Win Elections

Marko Rakar, Political Commentator

“It’s an urban fantasy series about secret magic in the modern world. October Daye, also known as Toby, is a half-fae changeling, which is a marginalized group within the fae world of the story. The first book in the series is titled Rosemary and Rue, and the rest of the books are also named after Shakespeare quotes. I love that. Toby initially works for a fae duke as a knight-errant, which is like a private investigator. Even though Toby is only a dogsbody, she has sword-fighting skills, low-level illusion skills, and a specific blood magic that is particular to her. In the prologue of the first story, she’s living in San Francisco with her steady boyfriend and their daughter. Then she gets cursed to be a fish for fourteen years. Between the prologue and the first chapter, she comes back, but by the time she’s back to normal, her boyfriend has married someone else and their kid is in high school. It’s very tragic. She’s alone in the world. She works at a grocery store. She avoids everyone from her old life, and she becomes a hermit. Then she is, once again, magically cursed. In this case, she’s cursed to find her friend’s killer. The rest of the books follow this format. She’s solving a mystery, finding a missing person, finding a missing object, or figuring out who murdered whom.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels With Battle Couples

Valerie Valdes, Novelist

“I defy anyone to read those opening pages…and not have it slightly get under their skin and haunt them…I believe that there’s been a lot of dispute about whether Mikhail Bulgakov was writing against Soviet atheism or in favour of it, against religion or in favour of it. Like all great art, it’s shot through with ambivalence. But I don’t think he could ever have written this other than through the collision of the creative impulse and the soulless worldview of Soviet communism. I just don’t think it would have been created other than through that rather disfiguring collision between creativity and conformity. And, for that reason alone, I just think it’s an astonishing book.” Read more...

Nick Clegg on his Favourite Books

Nick Clegg, Politician