Top 10 21st-Century Fantasy Novels

Tue 26 Jul 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

A Stranger in Olondria cover - Brian Attebury’s new book Fantasy: How It Works comes out from Oxford University Press in October and in the run up to the publication date he wrote up a Top 10 21st-century Fantasy Novels for the Guardian. I’ve read seven books on the list — I should just complete it! — and was very happy to see Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria on the list:

5. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (2013)
In this gorgeously written tour of a complex secondary world, Samatar explores ghosts, culture clashes and the effect of written language on a purely oral culture, while also providing engaging characters and a rousing adventure story. The imagined world of the fiction reflects Samatar’s own immersion in multiple cultures as the daughter of a Somali immigrant and a scholar of Arabic literatures with teaching experience in Sudan and Egypt.