This novel draws heavily on Polish folklore and the commonplace fairy-tale themes of an evil wood and a protective wizard, but you always know there is much more going on than nightmare creatures and headstrong princes being blasted with magic. The aspects of female loyalties and the roots of revenge create a true moral value within the epic dimension.
View Uprooted
This epic fantasy set in Regency England combines an Austenesque comedy of manners with Tolkien-style magical spells and fairytale characters. Aspects of racism, sexism and colonialism are also thrown into the brew, but if its escapism you’re after, you won’t get much more of an alternative reality than this.
View Sorcerer to the Crown
What might happen if professional historians were sent back in time to check that ideas regarding say William I's coronation are accurate? With strict instructions not to change anything of course. These short stories provide witty, often unexpected but completely plausible suggestions about, for example, what to swap with an Ancient Egyptian in order to get back a Glock - as well as fascinating and, to me, little known historical facts.
View The Long and Short of It
Thaniel works at the Whitehall Telegraph Office where warnings of the Clan na Gael bombings are received. Clockwork devices time the explosions but which London watchmaker is manufacturing these? Helped by Grace, a physics student from Oxford and Mori, a Japanese watchmaker, Thaniel races against time to prevent the next atrocity. This first novel, with brilliant characters, is clever, funny, exciting, tender and extremely atmospheric.
View The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
Talking snakes and otherworldly grandmothers who require spoon-feeding are the stuff of folktales, and unpredictable honorary aunts and local dignitaries driven to extremes by bureaucracy and modernity are hallmarks of a traditional society not coping well with change. Kaygusuz's short stories open windows into Turkish life, brought together by her amazing dreamlike realism.
View The Well of Trapped Words
What a delightful little book: sort of Jane Eyre and Moll Flanders meet H G Wells's Time Machine and Back to the Future. I loved every ridiculous minute of it.
View My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time
All is not as it first seems in this themed collection, which struck me as being both traditional and modern. Puppets talk, wolves are not wolves and characters roam between the pages. Although I embraced the weirdness, it may not appeal to readers who prefer a more straightforward form of story telling.
View What is Not Yours is Not Yours
I loved this fairy-tale story of transgender alienation and learning to feel again. It’s a little confusing at first but stick with it. It’s easy to read if you go with the flow and well worth the effort.
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A foundling, a shape-shifting wild animal and an urban wilderness make up the fairy tale elements of a modern fable – or is it? In this dreamlike blurring of everyday reality and the supernatural, we follow the human protagonist as she forges an unusual relationship with a visiting fox, while the vivid imagery lends an unsettling aura of enchantment, and we begin to fear for her sanity.
View How to be Human
This urban fairytale is a modern take on Joyce’s ambulatory paean to the city of Dublin. Wordplay on ‘changeling’ and ‘challenging’ sums up the beguiling narrator, who seems, in the Irish phrase, to be literally ‘away with the fairies’. Her whimsical perspective, as she searches for a portal to the ‘otherworld’, bring the city and its culture to life in an entertaining and touchingly original way.
View EggshellsYou won’t find the biggest bestsellers on Whichbook as everyone knows about them already. But you can use your enjoyment of a current bestseller to see titles with a similar mood that you might try next.
