“EVERY WAR HAS turning points and every person too.”

Daisy is sent to England to visit her aunt and cousins she's never met: three boys and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after she arrives. Then bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.

As power fails and the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it's a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, a place where Daisy's uncanny bond with her cousins grows into something rare and extraordinary. But the war is everywhere, and Daisy and her cousins must lead each other into a world that is unknown in the most elemental way.

Sophisticated, witty, convincing, Susanna Clarke weaves magic into a flawless vision of old England, creating an enchanted world.

English magicians were once a wonder of the world, commanding wind, hill, and wood. But by the 1800s they have lost the ability to perform magic, and instead write dull papers on its history.

But in Yorkshire reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a vast library of lost, forgotten books from the magical past and regained some of the powers. He goes to London to raise a beautiful woman from the dead and soon is helping the government in the war against Napoleon, creating ghostly fleets to confuse and alarm the French.

All goes well until a rival magician appears.

A Barbara’s favorite in hardcover, now in convenient paperback form.

Under a Bangkok bridge, inside a bolted Mercedes an African American Marine is killed by a meth-stoked python and a swarm of stoned cobras. Two cops arrive too late. Minutes later, only one is alive: Sonchai Jitpleecheep - a devout Buddhist, versed in the sacred and the profane - son of a long-gone G.I. and a Thai bargirl whose international clientele contributed to Sonchai’s sophistication. Now, his partner dead, Sonchai is doubly compelled to find the murderer, to maneuver through the world he knows - drugs, prostitution, corruption - and into a realm he has never encountered: the moneyed underbelly of the city, where desire rules and the human body is as mutable as raw jade. And where Sonchai tracks a killer - and an even more sinister predator.