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Every genre has its landmark novels. The books that quietly reshape everything that follows. Readers discover them decades later, only to wonder why they feel so familiar, forgetting that they're familiar because generations of writers have been borrowing from them ever since. Raymond E. Feist's Magician is one of those books.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell feels less like reading a fantasy novel and more like discovering a forgotten piece of English history that somehow slipped between the cracks of reality. The achievement of it is almost absurd. Clarke doesn’t simply build a world; she builds the illusion of scholarship around that world so convincingly that, by the end, the Raven King feels as historically inevitable as Napoleon.