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Audio CD Description It's 1808 and that Corsican upstart Napoleon is battering the English army and navy. Enter Mr. Norrell, a fusty but ambitious scholar from the Yorkshire countryside and the first practical magician in hundreds of years. What better way to demonstrate his revival of British magic than to change the course of the Napoleonic wars? Susanna Clarke's ingenious first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, has the cleverness and lightness of touch of the Harry Potter series, but is less a fairy tale of good versus evil than a fantastic comedy of manners, complete with elaborate false footnotes, occasional period spellings, and a dense, lively mythology teeming beneath the narrative. Mr. Norrell moves to London to establish his influence in government circles, devising such powerful illusions as an 11-day blockade of French ports by English ships fabricated from rainwater. But however skillful his magic, his vanity provides an Achilles heel, and the differing ambitions of his more glamorous apprentice, Jonathan Strange, threaten to topple all that Mr. Norrell has achieved. A sparkling debut from Susanna Clarke--and it's not all fairy dust. --Regina Marler

Customer Reviews Delightful Really, really good. I dislike the "Harry Potter for grownups" blather, because it's like comparing apples and oranges. True that it's darker than Harry, but it's also downright quirky in places, without becoming annoying. I found myself believing that the history was real, even to the point of thinking about it as I went through my day, as though I'd have to remember some of the facts for an exam or something. The footnotes are DENSE and would form a novel themselves. They make it very fun to read. It honestly took me awhile to get rolling on this book, and rightly so. At 800 pages, it's a daunting thing to lug around with you, let alone try to prop up on your chest as you read in bed late into the night. Brew a pot of tea, find a comfortable chair, and give it a try. The other reviewers are correct; the action doesn't explode off of the page the entire time, but you find yourself not caring so much. At its heart, the characters are real and engaging, and I found myself hating to leave them when I finished. If "intellectual fantasy" appeals to you, if I can call it that, this won't be a waste of your time. Excellent, haunting mature fantasy This is a big thick book, with a very complete and wittily drawn world. It's basically an "alternative history," set in early 19th-century England, but an England in which a former half-fairy king is accepted as part of the past the way we accept that Alfred the great existed. You'll enjoy this more if you've read Austen, Sterne and other eighteenth and nineteenth century writers, because Clarke has caught the style to a t-- even with archaic spelling. But the story moves along at an excellent pace. There is real magic at work-- it's delightful when Strange, one of the magicians (and at first, a student to the stuffy but rather dear, though pompous, Mr. Norrell) works for Wellington and ends up creating enchanted roads and moving Brussells around in order to confound the French, for example. Another lovely element of the book is the whole other world of Faerie. If you listen to old ballads you'll see that that world is often a very frightening, sad place, and so it is in this book-- the "gentleman with the thistle-down hair" is charming, funny and altogether amoral and bloodthirsty. Being stolen away to his world of "lost-hope" is to be forced to participate in dreary balls and processions-- part of the joke is that their dreariness and the humans' response to them is utterly missed by the Gentleman, who can only perceive that it must delight them as it delights him. The sad bells and mournful tunes of Faerie contribute to the atmosphere. The invention of John Unksglass, the legendary Raven King, is so convincing you find yourself forgetting at times that no such history existed. The ending disappointed me a little bit, but perhaps it means there's room for a sequel? Altogether a charming book. It really isn't "Harry Potter for adults" stylistically, but like that book, the book tells of the education of magicians. Wholly original and entertaining. Harry Potter for Grownups! Both my husband and I were captivated by this story! We listened to it on audio CD, which for me, made all of the footnotes easier to bear. (I don't know if I could deal with jumping back in forth between the footnotes and the story in the book version) We loved the story and it kept our interest to the very end.