About this item
In the Hugo-award winning, epic New York Times Bestseller and basis for the BBC miniseries, two men change Englands history when they bring magic back into the world.In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England - until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers and becomes an overnight celebrity.Another practicing magician then emerges: the young and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes Norrells pupil, and the two join forces in the war against France.But Strange is increasingly drawn to the wild, most perilous forms of magic, and he soon risks sacrificing his partnership with Norrell and everything else he holds dear.Susanna Clarkes brilliant first novel is an utterly compelling epic tale of nineteenth-century England and the two magicians who, first as teacher and pupil and then as rivals, emerge to change its history.
About the Author
Susanna Mary Clarke (born 1 November 1959) is an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) , a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.Two years later, she published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006) . Both Clarke's novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. While Strange focuses on the relationship of two men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, the stories in Ladies focus on the power women gain through magic. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Brooklyn, New York (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons.
