When will authors like Clarke realize that what the fantasy genre needs are more pseudo-medieval monomyths that sprawl out into fifteen volumes? Sigh, just what we need, another revolutionary, unusual fantasy book by an author with a practiced mastery of tone. She lives in Cambridge with her partner, the novelist and reviewer Colin Greenland. Another, "Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower," was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001. One, "The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse," first appeared in a limited-edition, illustrated chapbook from Green Man Press. She has published seven short stories and novellas in US anthologies. There she began working on her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.įrom 1993 to 2003, Susanna Clarke was an editor at Simon and Schuster's Cambridge office, where she worked on their cookery list. She returned to England in 1992 and spent the rest of that year in County Durham, in a house that looked out over the North Sea. The following year she taught English in Bilbao. In 1990, she left London and went to Turin to teach English to stressed-out executives of the Fiat motor company. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and has worked in various areas of non-fiction publishing, including Gordon Fraser and Quarto.
A nomadic childhood was spent in towns in Northern England and Scotland. Don’t be afraid that this book is part of a series though, it wraps up very nicely with no obnoxious cliffhangers.Susanna Clarke was born in Nottingham in 1959. Both Zacharias and Prunella are fantastic characters and I can barely wait for the next book in the series. The plot starts a little slowly, but quickly picks up and never stops. Honestly, the plot summary doesn’t do justice to how fun this book really was. He ends up meeting Prunella Gentleman, a very talented magician and they combine forces to figure out this pesky magic problem. Women are too frail and their brains too weak to use magic properly.
To get away from people trying to take his life, he travels to a girls’ school of magic where they teach their charges how to stifle their magical tendencies. He’s a convenient scapegoat because he’s black and most of the sorcerers are (obviously) racist 19th century white Englishmen. Unfortunately, the blame for this problem is lain at the feet of Zacharias Wythe, the young Sorcerer Royal of the Unnatural Philosophers. They’re already trying to conserve resources, but pretty soon, they’re going to be in deep trouble. The story takes place in Napoleonic Era England and the magicians are in crisis due to an abnormally low supply of magic in the atmosphere. I think it ties with The Girls at the Kingfisher Club for most entertaining reads of 2015.
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