There exists in this world a particular sort of reader—one who delights in stories where the ordinary conceals the extraordinary, where gods walk unnoticed through city streets, and where the darkness possesses a strange and beautiful poetry. If you count yourself among the devoted admirers of Neil Gaiman’s enchantments, then you have found your way to the right place.
What follows is a gathering of books that share that ineffable quality—the sense that just beyond the edge of what we can see, there exists something wonderful and terrible and true. These are tales recommended by discerning readers, celebrated by critics, and beloved by those who understand that the best stories are the ones that change us.
Mythology Reimagined
Circe by Madeline Miller
In the halls of the sun god Helios, there lived a daughter whom no one much noticed—until she discovered within herself a power that would frighten even the Olympians. Madeline Miller has crafted something rather extraordinary here: a tale that breathes new life into the witch of Aiaia, transforming a figure glimpsed briefly in Homer into a fully realized woman of tremendous depth and courage.
Miller’s prose possesses that rare quality of seeming both ancient and immediate. She invites us to walk beside Circe through centuries of exile, to understand her loneliness and her fierce independence, and to witness her encounters with figures we thought we knew—Prometheus, Daedalus, Odysseus—revealed in startling new light.
The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec
Angrboda’s tale begins, as so many witches’ tales do, with a burning. Cast out by Odin and left for dead, she retreats to the farthest reaches of the world—where, naturally, she encounters the trickster Loki. What unfolds is a love story of uncommon tenderness, a family saga of monsters who are not at all monstrous, and a meditation on what it means to know the future and yet choose to love anyway.
Gornichec has accomplished something rather wonderful: she has taken fragments scattered throughout the Norse myths and woven them into a complete tapestry. Those who cherished Gaiman’s own mythological retellings will find here a kindred spirit—an author who understands that the old stories matter precisely because they speak to what is eternal in us.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
In 1920s Mexico, a young woman named Casiopea opens a forbidden chest and inadvertently releases Hun-Kamé, the Mayan god of death. What follows is a journey through a Jazz Age landscape where ancient Xibalba and modern Mexico intertwine—a road story, a quest narrative, and a meditation on mortality all wrapped in the most sumptuous prose.
Moreno-Garcia brings to her tale the mythology of the Popol Vuh, and she does so with the understanding that these are not merely “other” stories but universal ones. The bargains struck with death, the price of ambition, the question of what we would sacrifice for freedom—these are matters that transcend any single culture.
Hidden Worlds and Strange Architectures
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Imagine, if you will, that magic departed from England sometime in the distant past, leaving behind only theoretical magicians who read books about the subject without ever practicing it. Then imagine that in the early nineteenth century, two very different men might restore English magic to its former glory—with consequences no one could have predicted.
Clarke’s magnificent novel unfolds across more than eight hundred pages of footnoted splendor, written in a style that recalls both Jane Austen and the strangest fairy tales. It won the Hugo Award and has been called “the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years.” Those who love Gaiman’s Englishness will find themselves quite thoroughly enchanted.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Piranesi lives in a House of infinite halls, where the ocean rushes through lower chambers and the only other living inhabitant he knows is a man called simply the Other. He catalogues statues, charts the tides, and tends to the skeletal remains of those who came before him—all with a gentle contentment that makes the gradual unraveling of his reality all the more devastating.
This slender volume won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and it demonstrates that Clarke’s genius extends beyond the epic scope of her debut. Here is a mystery, a meditation on memory and identity, and a love letter to the idea that wonder can exist even in the strangest circumstances.
The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
There stands a castle so vast that those within its walls may live their entire lives without glimpsing its full extent—a crumbling Gothic monument to ritual and decay called Gormenghast. Mervyn Peake created in these three novels a world utterly unlike any other, populated by grotesques who somehow become dear to us, governed by ceremonies whose origins no one remembers.
Literary critic Harold Bloom called this trilogy the finest fantasy of the twentieth century. Gaiman himself has praised Peake’s “astonishingly beautiful” creation. Those who venture within these pages will discover that the castle itself becomes a character—perhaps the most memorable character of all.
Little, Big by John Crowley
Smoky Barnable travels on foot to a house called Edgewood, there to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater in fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. What awaits him is four generations of an extraordinary family, a dwelling built of many architectural styles concealing doors to Faerie, and a story that moves both forward and backward through time.
This novel won the World Fantasy Award, and it remains one of those rare books that readers either adore with passionate devotion or struggle to penetrate at all. For those who find their way inside, Little, Big offers something very like enchantment itself—a sense that the world contains depths we never suspected.
Dark Fantasy and Strange Journeys
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
In the respectable trading town of Lud-in-the-Mist, citizens do not speak of Fairyland. They certainly do not speak of fairy fruit, that dangerous contraband that drifts down from the Debatable Hills, inducing in those who consume it an irresistible longing to abandon everything sensible and flee toward the unknown.
Gaiman has called this 1926 novel “a little golden miracle of a book” and counts it among his very favorites. It is said to have influenced both Susanna Clarke and John Crowley. Reading it, one understands why: Mirrlees created something timeless, a meditation on the costs of denying beauty and wonder in favor of respectability.
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
A million years hence, on an Earth now called Urth, the sun itself grows dim. In this strange twilight world lives Severian, a journeyman of the Guild of Torturers, who must journey across a transformed landscape where the relics of countless civilizations lie half-buried and half-forgotten.
Gaiman has named this his favorite science fiction novel of all time. Wolfe’s tetralogy rewards careful reading—indeed, demands it—for Severian is an unreliable narrator, and the truths of his tale reveal themselves only gradually. Those who love Gaiman’s layered storytelling will find here a master of the form.
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
In revolutionary Russia, young Marya Morevna witnesses suitors arriving at her family’s house transformed into birds—and when Koschei the Deathless comes for her, she accepts his proposal. Thus begins a tale that interweaves Slavic folklore with the siege of Leningrad, creating something that is both fairy tale and historical novel, both love story and war epic.
Valente writes with the kind of lyrical intensity that makes each sentence worth savoring. Critics have noted that this novel does for Russia what Clarke’s work does for England—it reimagines a nation’s mythology through the lens of its history.
Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott
Two estranged siblings inherit something rather unexpected: a house that walks on chicken legs, descended from the legendary hut of Baba Yaga herself. Isaac and Bellatine convert their inheritance into a traveling puppet theater, never suspecting that something called the Longshadow Man follows close behind, bringing with it the weight of tragedies a century old.
Nethercott, herself a folklorist, has crafted a tale that honors both Slavic legend and Jewish history. The novel confronts generational trauma with both unflinching honesty and genuine hope—and it does so while remaining thoroughly, beautifully strange.
Atmospheric Wonders
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Le Cirque des Rêves—the Circus of Dreams—arrives without warning and opens only after dark. Within its black-and-white striped tents await wonders that defy explanation: a garden made entirely of ice, a cloud maze, a bonfire that burns without heat. And behind it all, two young magicians compete in a game whose rules neither fully understands.
Morgenstern’s debut has been compared to Gaiman’s work for good reason: both authors understand that atmosphere can be as important as plot, that wonder requires no explanation to be felt. The Night Circus unfolds like a dream from which one does not wish to wake.
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
Kell is one of the last Antari—magicians capable of traveling between parallel versions of London. There is Grey London, our own drab reality; Red London, thriving with magic; White London, where power has corrupted everything it touches; and Black London, destroyed long ago by magical excess. Kell serves as a messenger between worlds, but he has developed a dangerous sideline as a smuggler.
Schwab has created a world of remarkable inventiveness, populated by characters who leap from the page. For those who loved the idea of London Below in Gaiman’s Neverwhere, here is London multiplied fourfold, each iteration stranger and more wondrous than the last.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
A graduate student discovers a peculiar book in his university library—a book that contains, among other stories, a tale from his own childhood that he has never told anyone. His search for answers leads him to a secret underground library, to doors that open onto impossible places, and to a love story written in honey and bone.
Morgenstern’s second novel is even more dreamlike than her first, a celebration of stories themselves and those who love them. It is a book about books, about the way narrative shapes our lives, about finding one’s place in a tale already centuries old.
A Final Word
The books gathered here share with Gaiman’s work a certain quality—call it the conviction that enchantment matters, that darkness and beauty intertwine, that stories possess genuine power. Each offers its own particular magic, its own doorway into the extraordinary.
For those who have wandered the streets of London Below, who have traveled with Shadow Moon across an American landscape filled with forgotten gods, who have understood that the Sandman’s realm borders our own—these fifteen volumes await. May they prove worthy companions on whatever journey you undertake next.
