Fantasy

Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell. It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life. But Will Self is no stranger to outrageousness Zigzagging chronologically, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s – more than a decade before Self lived in Ithaca with his parents, who then separated. He portrays it as a loose time at the faculty: the Hancocks display a ‘masochistic intimacy’ by swapping notes about the people they’ve

One of the first things I was taught in literary theory was to look for supposed rhetorical rather than logical opposites and unravel them. It works well with ‘the opposite of cat’. Cartoons show this can be either mouse or dog. The Book of Elsewhere, based on the comic BRZRKR, poses something similar with metaphysics. The protagonist, B., or Unute, has a narrative arc quickly summarised as ‘I kill, I die. I come back’. What is the opposite of B.? He is not alive in a way we understand, but he is not dead, or a zombie; he is not undying, and time alone will tell if he is immortal.

Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes’. By this definition, Elizabeth Knox’s genre-hopping fantasy The Absolute Book must count as oversized baggage; but it trundles along winningly, even if it’s a trifle stout at 640 pages. Taryn Cornick is our girl. She is a scholar whose debut book, a study of libraries, is the toast of the literary circuit. But she is also the recipient of an unlucky inheritance: an elusive manuscript, nicknamed the Firestarter, last spotted in the library of her grandfather’s ancestral pile. From these Borgesian beginnings, the story orbits into wider and

Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut from a cookery book editor seemed to promise an unfailing fountain of the creative imagination: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a three-volume reworking of Britain’s military tussle with Napoleon, but with added fairies, felt like Jane Austen brewed up with spells and a dash of the Brontës’ Angria sagas. A short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, set in the same eerie territory, followed, and since then — silence. Piranesi is a publishing event, therefore. Austere and classical, it has no fairies but plenty of magic. The title character