Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was the British writer Susanna Clarke's debut novel, published in 2004. The book is an alternative history set in nineteenth-century England during the Napoleonic Wars, and it imagines that magic once existed in the country and has come back in the hands of two men, Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. The book was adapted into a seven-part BBC television series in 2015, which was nominated for four BAFTA awards.

In 1806, practical magic in England has been reduced to a theory that nobody practises, which is a problem for a country at war with Napoleon. Mr Norrell is a reclusive Yorkshire magician who can still do it, and he moves to London to prove as much, to make magic respectable and to keep the practice of it to himself. He takes on no students and shares no techniques, because he believes that magic is safer in one pair of hands.

Jonathan Strange arrives later, younger, more willing to share and better with people, and becomes the pupil Norrell did not want and then the rival he cannot control. Between them they bring a fairy gentleman into English politics, which turns out to be the mistake the rest of the novel is measured against. The two of them work on the war, on the roads and on a set of old bargains that neither of them fully understands.

The prose is a pastiche of nineteenth-century writing, and it comes with a historian's apparatus: footnotes, a bibliography and long digressions on the theory of magic. It is a standalone book rather than the first of a series, and it remains Clarke's best-known novel, with the footnotes treated as part of the fiction rather than as scholarly decoration.