“This is what the novel ‘Master and Margarita’ might look like if Dickens had written it,” Alexander Genis thinks. And Neil Gaiman called this book “the best literary fairy tale in English in the last seventy years.” Here, England is a country of ancient magical traditions that are already in the past—and it fights Napoleon. Careful Mr. Norrrell and his impulsive student Jonathan Strange dream of reviving the art of magic. Here, “dark mythology rises against the backdrop of an exquisite comedy of manners in the spirit of Jane Austen, to create a masterpiece on Tolkien’s scale” (Time). Here, incredible conflicts—human and inhuman—are portrayed with absolute authenticity, and the realities, style, and language of a bygone era are recreated with the grandness and fussiness of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.”
The novel has been translated into dozens of languages, sold over a million copies worldwide, and was adapted for film: in 2015, BBC’s first channel released a TV mini-series of the same name, with the leading roles played by Bertie Carvel and Eddie Marsan.