In an interview on Fantasy

That’s four. You get one more.

It’s hard to pick one book to represent all the richness and coolness that’s going on in fantasy right now, in the present moment. But I have to, so I’m picking Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was published in 2004. The humour and sadness and beauty and complexity of this book, which took Clarke 10 years to write, are like nothing that came before it.

Unlike the fantasies of the 1920s and 1930s, Clarke’s book isn’t about people losing a world – instead they’re rediscovering magic that has been lost for centuries, and reacquainting themselves with both its great boons and also its enormous costs and the sorrows they bring. It’s a magic that feels absolutely real, as if the book were an eyewitness account. Not since Lewis has the supernatural been such a thrilling, immediate, concrete presence on the page. It’s no accident that I began The Magicians in 2004 – Strange is the book that woke me up to the power of the new fantasy. Read it, and you may be woken up too.

So she’s the future of fantasy?

Writers like Clarke aren’t just the future of fantasy, they’re the future of literature. We’re living at a time when more and more readers are turning to what used to be dismissed as genre fiction – fantasy, young adult novels, mysteries, science fiction, romance – to get what they used to get from literary fiction.

The reign of realism, which began in the 18th century, is finally being eroded. Writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem and Kazuo Ishiguro and Colson Whitehead are crossing from literary fiction into genre fiction, just as Clarke and Link and Gaiman and the others are crossing the same divide from the other direction. They’re interbreeding the two forms, to create new and vital kinds of novels for the new millennium. They’re our literary avant-garde. They’re the writers who are mapping out the future of the novel. From where I sit, it looks fantastic.