Books by Susan Cooper
“This is a story about a boy who comes of age. It’s around his eleventh birthday, which coincides with the winter solstice. It’s a book that’s very British – some people think of it as English, but there’s quite a heavy Welsh aspect to it, too – depicting a dark, folkloric, oppressive coming-into-reality that children go through. I think it’s one of the reasons why I felt attuned to it as a child: it marks the character’s move into adulthood too young, and an understanding of the world that takes away all of the certainties and the pleasantnesses, and replaces them with dark, historic, unpleasant facts about the past and about the way the world is.” Read more...
Alex Pheby, Novelist
Interviews where books by Susan Cooper were recommended
The Best Dark Fantasy Books, recommended by Alex Pheby
Dark fantasy undermines certainty and reality – but that’s exactly what we need, argues author and academic Alex Pheby. He talks us through his five favourites, and how they allegorize loss of innocence, question the real, and re-awaken our awareness of the human condition.
The Best Teen Fantasy Books Set in Britain, recommended by Sylvia Bishop
Britain offers rich pickings to writers: wild and windswept locations, peculiar folklore, a treasure trove of odd histories and even odder place names. Taking Britain as a starting point, many fantasy authors have produced stories that are at once wonderfully strange and hauntingly plausible. Our fantasy interviewer Sylvia Bishop picks out her top five fantasy books set in Britain for teen readers.
