Susanna Clarke books

Anthologies

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Reading Order

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Susanna Clarke is a British author who has published only a handful of books but made a large impression with each one. Her debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), took ten years to write and arrived as a nearly 800-page story about two magicians in an alternate version of England during the Napoleonic Wars. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and was adapted into a BBC television series in 2015.

After Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke published The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2004), a collection of short fiction set in the same world and drawing on similar fairy tale and folklore traditions. She then spent years dealing with chronic fatigue syndrome, which limited her writing output. When Piranesi appeared in 2020, it was a very different book: a short, mysterious novel about a man living in an enormous house filled with statues, where ocean tides wash through the lower halls. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021.

Clarke’s fiction combines careful historical research with a genuine sense of the strange. Her version of magic feels rooted in old English and Celtic folklore rather than the high fantasy tradition. Before her novels, she published short stories in anthologies edited by Terri Windling, Ellen Datlow, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and those early pieces already showed her distinctive voice: precise, a little wry, and deeply interested in how the magical might fit alongside the ordinary.