Baudolino – Umberto Eco

What happens

Baudolino is an itinerant liar with leonine hair, a love of storytelling, a wry sense of humour and a big heart. The story is supposedly narrated by him. It is framed as a conversation between Baudolino and Niketas, which takes place amid the sack of Constantinople in the 13h century.

Baudolino describes his life, from his beginnings as an Italian peasant to his journey to the mythical kingdom of Prester John. Along the way he takes in war between the medieval Italian city-states, adoption by the Emperor Frederick 1, becomes the real author

of the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, meets blemmys, skiapods and unicorns, and falls in love with a Gnostic nympth. The novel is a funny, absorbing and erudite rampage through medieval history, literature, mythology and theology, as told by a narrator whose word is all the more believable for being known to be unreliable.

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Abhorsen – Garth Nix

What happens

This book concludes the series begin with Sabriel and Lirael. There’s another naughty necromancer trying to destroy the world, and various young folks have to join forces to stop them from doing so. It’s set about 20 years after Sabriel, and straight after Lirael, and stars Sabriel’s children and Lirael.

In the process Lirael discovers her true heritage, Sabriel’s son Sameth stops being a wuss, we finally find out what the Disreputable Dog really is and everyone spends a lot of time running away from zombies. It all ends satisfactorily, though not without some losses and a shed load of magic.

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Lirael – Garth Nix

What happens

Teenage Lirael lives in a glacier-topped mountain with a sisterhood of seers called the Clayr. She’s a dark-haired, loneoy misfit in a society of smug, clairvoyant blondes, and gets progressively more miserable as her own clairvoyance stubbornly refuses to surface. So she gets a job in the library (a deeply magical place itself) and begins exploring. In the process she makes her way through a series of slightly Dungeons & Dragons-ish challenges, gains a mysterious magical dog friend, and begins to develop a sense of her own identity.

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Sabriel – Garth Nix

What happens

On one side of a kind of occult Berlin Wall is the Old Country, a kingdom run on standard fantasy-fiction feudal lines. In the Old Kingdom, magic works: the kingdom is founded on the Charter, a kind of magical pact that lets adepts use the source code of the universe to make things happen. And mages that don’t adhere to the Charter, but use Free Magic, are bad and naughty and forever raising the dead. So, to protect the world, one wizard is able to use both – the Abhorsen. It’s his or her job to chase zombies back to the land of the dead, stop necromancers from raising more, and generally keep the peace between life and death.

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The Year Of Our War – Steph Swainston

What happens:

The story is set in the Fourlands, an alter-world with a climate a bit like northern Europe. It is narrated by Comet Jant Shira, a drug-addicted cross between two humanoid races and the only person in his world who can fly. He’s a member of the Castle Circle, an elite group of immortals whose job it is to protect ordinary humans from the depredations of giant, hostile insects that come from who knows where.

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Twilight – Stephanie Meyer

What happens:

Emo teenage girl moves from dappy mother in sunny place to rainy town in Washington. She thinks she’s different to everyone else, but everyone at school either wants to be her friend or fancies her. She falls over a lot, thinks pale but gorgeous boy in her class hates her, discovers that he’s actually a vampire and avoiding her because she smells delicious and he wants to bite her. Falls improbably in love with vampire, gets chased by other vampire, gets rescued from other vampire, is disappointed when doesn’t get turned into vampire at school prom.

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