Items25The creator’s order
  1. 1Piranesi (2020)Piranesi (2020) 8.7/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2020The House has tides to observe, statues to attend to and more halls than its journal keeper can know. Clarke makes patient looking a relationship with an impossible place. Piranesi's care for it is threatened by another person's pursuit of knowledge and power. Read for wonder grounded in small acts…0
  2. 2Lud-in-the-mist (1926)Lud-in-the-mist (1926) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1926The town's respectable citizens outlaw talk of Faerie while fairy fruit and an older history refuse to stay outside their lives. Magic acquires the force of something both desired and publicly denied, making family worry inseparable from a whole community's evasions. The older, elaborate prose…0
  3. 3Little, Big (1981)Little, Big (1981) 7.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1981Smoky Barnable marries into the Drinkwater family at Edgewood, a house whose architecture seems to lead further into the world of faerie. Generations, photographs and the patterns of family life carry the enchantment. Crowley lets you sense a design larger than any one character can see, while…0
  4. 4The king of Elfland's daughter (1924)The king of Elfland's daughter (1924) 7.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1924A wish for a magical ruler brings a mortal family into contact with Elfland, where time and attachment do not behave as they do at home. Dunsany's repeated phrases and luminous distances make enchantment feel like an altered state of attention. The cost falls on people trying to love across that…0
  5. 5Mythago Wood (1984)Mythago Wood (1984) 7.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1984Ryhope Wood occupies a small patch of Herefordshire yet opens into a much larger interior, where inherited stories can take bodily form. A family's fascination with it makes the uncanny painfully personal. The forest offers no neutral place from which to study its wonders: entering means becoming…0
  6. 6The owl service (1967)The owl service (1967) 7.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1967A pattern on a dinner service draws three young people in a Welsh valley towards an ancient story that may be repeating through them. The plates are an especially fine uncanny object: ordinary domestic things become inseparable from a landscape and its pressures. Class, family tension and desire…0
  7. 7Fire and Hemlock (2012)Fire and Hemlock (2012)Published 1 Jan 2012Polly discovers that she has two incompatible sets of memories, and reconstructing her childhood reveals a dangerous relationship between everyday life and old ballads. Stories, music and remembered objects gather magical force before their pattern becomes clear. Read for the unsettling possibility…0
  8. 8Ombria in shadow (2002)Ombria in shadow (2002) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2002A struggle over a city's ruler unfolds beside a stranger city of shadows, ghosts and concealed passages. McKillip makes the ordinary and the magical feel like overlapping impressions of the same place, each changing how the other can be read. Sorcery matters through loyalties, protection and the…0
  9. 9Alphabet of thorn (2004)Alphabet of thorn (2004) 6.7/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2004Nepenthe, a translator raised among palace books, becomes absorbed in a text written in a thorn-like language that seems to call specifically to her. Reading has the danger and intimacy of handling an object whose purpose is still concealed. Its old history starts to bear on a young queen's…0
  10. 10The hearing trumpet (1976)The hearing trumpet (1976) 8.7/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1976A hearing trumpet alerts Marian Leatherby to her family's plans to send her to an institution, where an already peculiar world becomes extravagantly occult. Carrington gives objects, buildings and rituals a painter's freedom to become something else. The escalating surrealism also makes room for…0