Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill'd Queen
World Fantasy Award winner (1979) and the bridge between Peake's gothic tradition and the New Weird; Miéville and VanderMeer both point straight at it.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell about?
England, 1806: magic is a respectable theoretical discipline that no one has practised in three hundred years — until the fussy, jealous Mr Norrell makes the statues of York Minster speak, raises a cabinet minister's fiancée from the dead (the terms of that bargain being the book's long fuse), and sets about making magic respectable by making it dull. His pupil Jonathan Strange — brilliant, careless, soon conjuring roads for Wellington in the Peninsula — prefers the older, wilder tradition of the Raven King, the magician-monarch of the North. Their quarrel, the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, and the footnotes (a complete invented scholarship, each one a sprung trap) compose the most convincing alternative England ever written.
Why it matters
Hugo, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic winner, Booker-longlisted, a million-copy bestseller and BBC series: the book that demonstrated, once and for all, that the full apparatus of the literary novel and the full apparatus of fantasy are the same machine.
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Till We Have Faces
Widely held (by Lewis himself, among others) to be his best book: the proof that the Narnian apologist could write tragic, ambiguous myth for adults — a touchstone for literary fantasy's mythic-retelling tradition.
Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.