Reading List
Jo Walton
Novelist and Poet
Jo Walton is a Welsh-Canadian writer who moves between fantasy, science fiction and alternate history without much regard for the borders. Among Others, about a girl who survives a family catastrophe largely by reading science fiction, won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 2012, and Tooth and Claw, a Victorian novel whose characters are all dragons, took the World Fantasy Award. She is also one of the field’s most prolific rereaders and critics, which makes her recommendations unusually well founded.
01
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
“I don’t love it. I admire it no end. But I don’t love it, because it doesn’t let you ever be comfortable, and you are always on edge reading it. Which is right for fairies! Fairies are an uncomfortable thing. They’re an element that puts you on edge. But it makes it less lovable than some of these other books. Clarke’s more recent book, Piranesi – which has no fairies – I just love.” — via Interview, March 2026
02
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Thomas the Rhymer
by Ellen Kushner
“Thomas the Rhymer is one of the books in the fairy tale series that Terri Windling published. By all rights, I shouldn’t like Thomas the Rhymer, but Ellen Kushner is a very, very good writer. It is a book that is set in Fairyland, and it’s taking the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, which is a traditional ballad, and putting it into a real moment of history. It’s a very solid, well-thought-through world.” — via Interview, March 2026
03
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The Wood Wife
by Terri Windling
“Terri Windling is a very, very important person when you’re talking about fairy, because she and Ellen Datlow edited a series of anthologies of modern fairy tales throughout the ’90s and the early 2000s that were very important. The Wood Wife is an absolutely terrific book in a genre that I normally don’t like – having fairies and magic in the modern world. This normally drives me nuts: am I supposed to be stupid?” — via Interview, March 2026
04
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The Broken Sword
by Poul Anderson
“I read it when I was twelve or thirteen, and it was very influential for me. I really fell into that world, and I really admired it. When I came back to it as an adult, I was almost afraid that it would be ruined, like children’s books sometimes are when your reader experience made them better than they actually are. But when I read it, I thought, ‘No, this book really is doing this.” — via Interview, March 2026
05
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Lud-in-the-Mist
by Hope Mirrlees
“Lud-in-the-Mist is a very interesting book, because it occurred before genre-fantasy was a thing. There was not yet a genre that was fantasy. There weren’t fantasy readers. It was being read by ordinary people. Mirrlees was a friend of TS Eliot’s, and a modernist, but she wrote this very unusual novel in 1926.” — via Interview, March 2026