Susanna Clarke
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the most acclaimed fantasy debut of its century — the book that made footnotes glamorous and English magic a serious literary subject — and Piranesi's labyrinth has already joined the genre's…
Gaslamp Fantasy
Fantasy in a nineteenth-century register: magic and monsters amid gas lights, penny dreadfuls and crumbling empires.
The authors (2)
Stephen Hunt
A significant figure in the steampunk and gaslamp revival — the Jackelian books were among the movement's defining commercial successes — and, through SFcrowsnest, one of online genre journalism's genuine pioneers: few people…
Essential books, oldest first (4)
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.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
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…
The Court of the Air
One of the defining novels of the 2000s steampunk revival: a HarperCollins Voyager lead title sold into a dozen-plus languages, launching the six-volume Jackelian sequence and establishing gaslamp…
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
The Jackelian sequence's consensus favourite: the volume that proved the world could support standalone adventures in any genre key, with Amelia Harsh as Hunt's most quoted heroine.