Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Buy Now for £19.99
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Narrated by:
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Neil Gaiman
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Richard Armitage
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V.E. Schwab
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By:
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Susanna Clarke
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, read by Richard Armitage with Neil Gaiman and an introduction by V E Schwab.
The 20th anniversary edition of the fantasy classic.
‘The book I wish I'd written’ R F Kuang
‘Susanna Clarke writes with an intelligence and beauty that seems at times miraculous’ Katherine Rundell
1806. England is beleaguered by the long war, and centuries have passed since magicians faded from view. But one remains: the reclusive Mr Norrell. Proceeding to London, he raises a woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French.
Yet the cautious Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician. Young, handsome and daring, Jonathan Strange is his very antithesis. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men – which overwhelms that between England and France. And soon their own secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine…
'Like Hilary Mantel, Clarke has made the very notion of genre seem quaint' Guardian
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Critic reviews
'Clarke creates a world beyond our wildest imagination that also tells us something profound about what it is to be human' (BERNARDINE EVARISTO)
'What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being' (DAVID MITCHELL)
'A miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling' (MADELINE MILLER)
'Purely joyful reading' (NAOMI ALDERMAN)
'Admirably inventive, frequently delightful' (MICHEL FABER)
Great audiobook
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I loved the writing style.
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Susanna Clarke’s writing is, simply put, extraordinary. Nobody writes quite like her — her prose is meticulous, sly, and quietly dazzling. She doesn’t just create a world; she conjures it with such precision and strangeness that it feels both magical and deeply real. There’s a unique pleasure in the way she dances with frustration and dissatisfaction — drawing things out, withholding resolution, making you yearn — and yet, it’s satisfying in a way that’s hard to articulate. You just have to read it to understand.
The real marvel of this book, for me, lies in how Clarke weaves magic into history and culture, making enchantment feel like a plausible part of 19th-century England. And the fairies — eerie, beguiling, terrifying — are unlike any I’ve encountered elsewhere in fiction. Her world-building is implacable in the best sense: relentless, intricate, believable.
But no masterpiece is without its cracks. It is long. Long-winded, even. There are sections that could have been tightened, trimmed, or reimagined without losing the novel’s soul. And while Clarke’s portrayal of women captures the period’s social constraints with fidelity, it doesn’t always give them the same emotional depth or narrative weight she affords her male protagonists — a missed opportunity in an otherwise richly peopled world.
Still, if you can commit, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a rare and remarkable feat of imagination. It makes you believe — not just in magic, but in the power of language, of atmosphere, of patient, spellbinding storytelling.
Then the world sang to me 4,5
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Loved this
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Very good and very strange
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