‘She convinces us that magic lives in our world’: VE Schwab on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

‘She convinces us that magic lives in our world’: VE Schwab on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

As Susanna Clarke’s fantasy opus turns 20, the Vicious author recalls how she reluctantly started reading it but was soon hooked

We bring ourselves to books. Who we are. Who we believe ourselves to be. Our personal history, our experiences, our needs, our wants, our biases. We pack all of it on our person. We carry it with us, like a satchel, on our journey into fiction. Sometimes, it helps us on the road. Other times, it weighs us down. Holds us back.

As writers, it is the part we can never account for – the fact that each and every reader who stumbles on our work carries their own world, their own mind. We know that the right reader might find our work at the wrong time. That for some, there will never be a right time; they are on a different journey. But there is another category of reader: the reluctant one.

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