Unable to explain their anguish, their isolation is total.Ĭlarke’s fans believed the book would elevate the fantasy genre to new heights of respectability and esteem, and indeed, Jonathan Strange was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, becoming the first and only work to receive both a recognition from that prestigious institution and a Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest honor. Exhausted, these captives return to England every morning only to find that an enchantment prevents them from speaking of their suffering. But as the magicians gain power, a faerie steals their loved ones and brings them to a place called Lost-Hope, where they are forced to spend each night participating in dreary processions and ghostly balls. Those who master these magical arts can conjure wonders from their surroundings - works of poetry written in the land and sky. Writing in a voice that evokes Jane Austen’s, Clarke presented magic not as some pyrotechnic force, a bolt of light crackling from a wand, but as the language of trees and rain and the stones of old cathedrals, of all the mundane things that made up the pastoral landscape of a forgotten English past.

Spanning nearly 800 footnote-laden pages, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell tells the story of a pair of dueling magicians in Regency England who restore magic to the British Isles some 300 years after its abrupt disappearance. Her friend the fantasist Neil Gaiman later said that encountering her writing was akin to “watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time, and she plays a sonata.” It was nearly 20 years ago that a first-time novelist named Susanna Clarke, then 44 years old and earning a living as an editor of cookbooks, finished writing what was perhaps the greatest and most original British work of fantasy published in England since the days of C. S. Lewis and J.R.R.

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