Fantasy is now the best-selling fiction genre in Australia, says book reviewer COLIN STEELE, who illustrates why in his latest column.

Fantasy has increasingly impacted the cultural mainstream, be it through books, TikTok, games or movies. 

Fantasy is now the best-selling fiction genre in Australia. According to Nielsen BookData, American fantasy author Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm sold 119,300 copies in its first week of publication at the end of January, bringing in nearly $3 million in hardback and paperback versions in one week alone. 

Susanna Clarke’s award-winning historical fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury, $39.99), which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, has sold more than four million copies since it was first published in 2004. It was made into a BBC TV series in 2015.

Bloomsbury has now issued a hardback, 20th century anniversary commemorative edition, with an introduction by best-selling American fantasy author VE Schwab, who says: “It’s not that Clarke tells the story of a world possessing magic, It’s that she convinces us that magic lives in ours”.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is set in an alternative Napoleonic England, in which two men, the reclusive scholar magician Mr Norrell and the young charismatic Mr Strangel, unleash the buried powers of English magic, an act that will dramatically impact their lives and those around them. Clarke’s original creation, her textual buttressing of the magic framework and adoption of literary pastiche, ranging from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens, ensured a fantasy classic.

Susanna Clarke has also released a short novella The Wood at Midwinter (Bloomsbury, $14.99), illustrated by Victoria Sawdon, with a suggested link to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The story sees Merowdis, a 19-year-old young woman walking in snowy woods where she feels at home with animals and trees. In an afterword, Clarke notes she was influenced by the music of Kate Bush’s 2011 song 50 Words for Snow.

Merowdis informs the trees that she wants a “midwinter child… A child to bring light into the darkness”. Clarke then moves away from the familiar Christmas birth narrative into the framework of folklore as Merowdis becomes a bridge between different worlds.

Best-selling and award-winning author Neil Gaiman, now under media siege as a result of sexual misconduct allegations by numerous women, had previously described Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as the finest work of English fantasy in the last 70 years. 

Gaiman also provides the introduction to a much more expensive, lavishly illustrated, three volume edition of Clarke’s book published by the British Folio Society, priced at a whopping £190 ($A380).

Gaiman‘s 2017 interpretation of stories of Norse Mythology (Bloomsbury, $60) has now been reissued in an updated version, with dramatic full-page colour illustrations by Australian-based artist Levi Pinfold. Gaiman effectively delivers through vibrant clear prose, and often with dry humour, his interpretation of the Norse legends.

Gaiman begins with the formation of the legendary nine worlds and ends with the great battle of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods and the rebirth of a new time and people. In 16 segments, we find all the familiar figures such as Odin, Thor, Loki, and Freya. An essential companion to the current cinematic interpretations of the Norse legends.

JOANNE Harris has written 20 novels, one of which, her 1999 novel Chocolat, was filmed with Johnny Depp and Juliet Binoche. 

The Moonlight Market (Gollancz, $32.99) is a fantasy, described by Harris as “Romeo and Juliet, with fairies”, although with a much less tragic end.

Tom Argent, an orphan and reclusive photographer in London, is unaware that London’s King’s Cross, is the principal location of a centuries-old war between two factions, the Midnight Folk and The Daylight Folk.

Humans are called the Sightless Folk, but Tom Argent slowly begins to see the hidden mysterious world after the beautiful Vanessa enters the small photographic shop in which he works and buys a photograph.

Tom’s misguided love takes him, via a moonlit market, into an alternate world of time and place, hidden amongst the streets and rooftops of London. 

Tom slowly finds out that he will have a vital role resolving a millennia-long dispute between the Moth King and the Butterfly Queen over a lost young prince, “a boy of both light and shadow”, a quest that will allow him to save his true love Charissa and reunite the kingdom.

Beneath the fantasy framework of The Moonlight Market, Harris reflects on issues of inequality and celebrity, the role of memory, the nature of reality and how love can transform. 

If Shakespeare is to be cited, maybe A Midsummer Night’s Dream might have been more appropriate.