Books like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
What should you read after Susanna Clarke’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Susanna Clarke
- 2004
- Historical fantasy
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Ten Thousand Doors of January
Alix E. Harrow
Harrow builds her fantasy out of documents, scholarship and a second text running underneath the first — the nearest anyone has come to Clarke's method.
- Footnotes with their own stories
- Regency prose played straight
- Magic restored to England
- Half the length, faster moving
Great matchThe Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker
A patient historical novel in which the supernatural is simply another fact of the period, and two very different beings need each other more than they admit.
- Two magicians who fall out
- Regency prose played straight
- A thousand pages to sink into
- 1899 New York, not Regency England
Great matchThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
Two magicians bound into a contest neither fully controls, in a nineteenth century rendered as spectacle. Clarke's rivalry with the intellect swapped for beauty.
- Two magicians who fall out
- Regency prose played straight
- Style over structure
Worth a look — with a warningCirce
Madeline Miller
For the sentences and the long view of a life spent doing magic, rather than for anything English or footnoted. Miller is the better prose stylist of the two.
- Faerie as genuinely dangerous
- Magic restored to England
- Greek myth, no history
Great matchThe Starless Sea
Erin Morgenstern
Built out of interleaved fragments, fables and found texts that comment on the main story — Clarke's footnote apparatus reimagined as the architecture itself.
- Footnotes with their own stories
- A thousand pages to sink into
- Faerie as genuinely dangerous
- Plot dissolves deliberately
Best for magic as a disciplineThe Magicians
Lev Grossman
Magic here is a grinding academic subject with syllabus, exams and rivalry, and the older world behind it is far less charmed than anyone hoped.
- Magic restored to England
- Faerie as genuinely dangerous
- Two magicians who fall out
- Contemporary, sardonic register
Great matchThe Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
Arden's old spirits are exactly as amoral and mannered as the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, and her historical setting is as carefully built as Clarke's.
- A gentleman with thistle-down hair
- Faerie as genuinely dangerous
- Medieval Rus', not Regency England
Worth a look — with a warningThe Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
For readers who came for the long immersive nineteenth-century pleasure rather than the magic: same commitment to a period, same relish for a large cast.
- Regency prose played straight
- A thousand pages to sink into
- No magic anywhere in it
Great matchThe Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
Gaiman's old powers bargain in the same courteous, terrifying English register, and the harm they do is the harm Clarke's gentleman does to Stephen Black.
- A gentleman with thistle-down hair
- Faerie as genuinely dangerous
- Under 200 pages
Great matchThe Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V.E. Schwab
A bargain struck with something inhuman, whose terms are honoured exactly and ruinously, across three centuries of European history. Clarke's contract logic, in miniature.
- A gentleman with thistle-down hair
- Magic used in the Napoleonic wars
- Romance is central
Best for hidden EnglandNeverwhere
Neil Gaiman
The other great novel about a second England running underneath the ordinary one, with its own etiquette, its own aristocracy and no interest in your comfort.
- Magic restored to England
- A gentleman with thistle-down hair
- Faerie as genuinely dangerous
- Modern London, much lighter
Worth a look — with a warningThe Hazel Wood
Melissa Albert
Its fairy realm operates on fixed, merciless rules that cost real people real things, which is Clarke's view of Faerie in a contemporary American register.
- Faerie as genuinely dangerous
- Footnotes with their own stories
- Contemporary YA voice
Best for scholarly magic gone wrongThe Library at Mount Char
Scott Hawkins
Magic as twelve unbearable curricula, studied under a master who is not remotely benign, with a comic deadpan that lands the way Clarke's understatement does.
- Magic restored to England
- Two magicians who fall out
- Footnotes with their own stories
- Extremely violent in places
What should you read after Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell?
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow — harrow builds her fantasy out of documents, scholarship and a second text running underneath the first — the nearest anyone has come to Clarke's method.
If what stayed with you was two magicians who fall out, read The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker instead: a patient historical novel in which the supernatural is simply another fact of the period, and two very different beings need each other more than they admit. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is the other strong option — two magicians bound into a contest neither fully controls, in a nineteenth century rendered as spectacle. Clarke's rivalry with the intellect swapped for beauty.
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