Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 272 pages. “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the three Tides. This is something that happens once every eight years.” This is how the book begins. The narrator lives in a vast labyrinth of halls filled …
Category: Fantasy / Sci-Fi
Black Leopard, Red Wolf: Marlon James
Published by Riverhead Books / Penguin, 2019, 640 pages. “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.” This is how the book starts. It feels like a spoiler, because the crux of the story is that a man, known only as Tracker, has been paid to look for a boy. He isn’t sure …
Good Omens: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Published by Ace Books / Gollancz / Corgi, 1990, 368 pages. This delightfully subversive look at the Apocalypse and everything that went before is one of my favourite books. Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon, have been living on Earth since the beginning. Crowley, who starts out as the serpent in the Garden of …
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The Sultanpur Chronicles—Shadowed City: Achala Upendran
Published by Hachette India, 2018, 360 pages. Welcome to a world of magic, flying carpets and rakshasas[1]! Before I go any further, full disclosure: Achala Upendran is a friend. This is her first novel. Sultanpur is a vast empire, ranging from mountainous Firozia to the cities of Dastakar. It is home to humans, djinns and …
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Frankenstein in Baghdad: Ahmed Sadaawi
Translated from Arabic by Jonathan WrightPublished by OneWorld Publications / Penguin, 2018, 272 pages. Original version published in 2013. Ahmed Sadaawi takes the story of Frankenstein and transposes it to Baghdad in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. Bombs go off regularly on the streets and people die every …
Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: Salman Rushdie
Published by Jonathan Cape / Vintage, 2015, 304 pages. “This is the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn…who loved a mortal man long ago, in the twelfth century…and of her many descendants.” This is Salman Rushdie as Scheherazade, narrating events that take place over 1,001 nights. Jinns are creatures of smoke …
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The Book of Dust, Book 1: La Belle Sauvage—Philip Pullman
Published by Penguin Random House, 2017, 560 pages. A mysterious substance called Dust; the alethiometer, an instrument that can reveal the truth; and daemons, animal-shaped manifestations of people’s inner selves: we are in familiar territory, the world of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. Almost 20 years after the last book in the trilogy was …
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Civil War, again
American War published by Penguin Random House / Knopf, 2017, 352 pages. One comes to books through many routes. I've been fortunate to have been surrounded by fellow bibliophiles who often come bearing wonderful gifts of books I may not have run into otherwise. Some of my favorite titles have been introduced to me thus. …
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—JK Rowling, John Thorne and John Tiffany
Published by Sphere, 2016, 352 pages. So you thought we’d come to the end of the Harry Potter story…well, think again. JK Rowling, with some help this time, has written another instalment. This one takes place 19 years after the events of the last Potter book, and the plot revolves around Harry’s second son, Albus …
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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: Susanna Clarke
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004, 782 pages. England, early 1800s. The country is at war with France under Napolean. Magic—the practical kind, anyway—has not been seen in the land for hundreds of years. The only magicians left are theoreticians, men who had never caused a “leaf to tremble upon a tree or made one mote …
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