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Photo: Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Brooklyn, New York · CC BY 2.0 · via source

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Susanna Clarke

English author of fantastical fiction, known for the historical magic of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and the mysterious, many-halled world of Piranesi.

2 published books 0 published articles

About Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke is an English novelist whose career began in publishing. She worked as an editor while writing her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which appeared in 2004. She has also published The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a story collection partly set in the same imagined England, and the illustrated story The Wood at Midwinter.

Clarke writes fantasy with the patience and precision of literary fiction. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell restores practical magic to Regency England, following two rival magicians through drawing rooms, the Napoleonic Wars and perilous dealings with Faerie. Its scholarly footnotes build an invented history around the plot. Piranesi is far leaner: a journal narrated from an immense House of statues, tides and seemingly endless halls. Both books examine wonder, knowledge and the dangers of intellectual pride.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award, and was adapted as a seven-part BBC television series. Piranesi won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Ladies of Grace Adieu offers another route into Clarke’s world of English magic.

Start with Piranesi if you want a compact mystery whose strange architecture gradually yields its secrets. Choose Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell first if you prefer an expansive historical novel, intricate world-building and footnotes that tell stories of their own.

Published books

Author

Piranesi

Piranesi lives in the House, an apparently endless world of classical halls, monumental statues, birds, clouds, and seawater. He maps its spaces, predicts its dangerous tides, cares for its dead, and records his discoveries in journals. His only regular companion is the Other, a sharply contrasting figure who treats the House as the possible repository of secret knowledge. When signs suggest that another living person has entered this world, Piranesi begins examining inconsistencies in his records and gaps in his memory. What starts as an account of solitary exploration gradually becomes a mystery about identity, captivity, trust, and the uses of knowledge. Susanna Clarke combines a fantastical setting with the investigative momentum of a psychological mystery, making the narrator’s careful observations both the substance of the world and the means by which its hidden history can be recovered.

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Author

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

In an alternative version of early nineteenth-century England, magic survives mainly as an antiquarian subject discussed by gentlemen who cannot perform it. That changes when the private, possessive Gilbert Norrell proves that practical magic still exists. Seeking respectability and political influence, he takes English magic to London and offers his services during the Napoleonic Wars. His rise depends, however, on a secret bargain with a dangerous fairy. Jonathan Strange soon emerges as a second practicing magician. More intuitive, sociable, and adventurous than Norrell, Strange becomes first his pupil and then his rival. Their dispute over how magic should be studied, controlled, and restored draws in the Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron, the legendary Raven King, and people trapped by enchantments the magicians do not fully understand. Susanna Clarke combines historical fantasy, social comedy, Gothic unease, and an invented scholarly record to examine authority, ambition, knowledge,…

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