The best fantasy books that transport you from reality to imagination

I loved Mary Norton’s book for its narrative hook: size. This is Gulliver’s Lilliput without the satiric political overtones. The main characters are a miniature Edwardian family called the Clocks because they live underneath one. The father, Pod, his wife, Homily, and their daughter, Arietty, are so small they fit under the floorboards of a human-sized house.

All their ingenuity is devoted to adapting their smallness to the world of Big People while preventing them from being “seen” by them. Everything they use must be “borrowed” from the bigger world and adapted to their circumstances. Matchboxes become dressers and chests of drawers; postage stamps serve as wall hangings and pictures; a thimble does duty as a soup tureen, while an actual tureen becomes a bathtub.

The discovery of a fully furnished doll’s house has become an occasion for wholesale redecoration. A crisis comes when Arietty is “seen” by the human Boy who lives above them, and they must make a decision.  

With E.R. Eddison’s book, the hook is identity. I love that the major characters are all avatars, manifestations of each other, and that they don’t know it is the underlying mystery Eddison wants the reader to discover without being told.

All of his men derive from the godlike Mezentius, and all his women derive from the Goddess. Their lives and characters intertwine the real and imaginary worlds of Earth and Zimizmvia. The human Lady Mary is the real-world avatar of the Zimiamvian goddess Fiorinda, who is the lover of Duke Barganax, who is the otherworld personification of the real-world Lessingham, widower of Lady Mary and lover of the Zimizmvian princess Antiope.

If you start to get confused, you are on the right track! Eddison aims to confuse, mystify, and enter you all simultaneously.

Ursula Le Guin’s book uses gender identity to address reader estrangement. I love that Le Guin ruthlessly runssacks all our preconceptions, interrogates the assumptions we mistake for laws, and deconstructs conventional notions of what makes a viable society.

The locale is the planet of Winter, where it is always either cold or colder. There is sex but no gender, and individuals can father a child or give birth to one. This circumstance becomes endlessly confusing to Genly Ai, the male visitor from planet Earth, who doesn’t know how to respond to his guide and benefactor Estraven or even what pronoun to use.

It isn’t that he gets the signals wrong, it’s that there are no signals and he doesn’t know how to navigate without them—learning how to respond to people as individuals instead of gendered types.  

Russell Hoban’s slim (c. 250 pp) novel is a unique futuristic dystopian science fiction political satire fantasy about the re-discovery of gunpowder in a post-nuclear Holocaust England, where disaster has regressed to the Stone Age.

I know no other book like it, and as a reading experience, it can’t be beaten. There are discoveries on every page. Its characters are hunter-gatherers controlled by a shadow government of Punch and Judy puppeteers who are trying to promote another nuclear war. Its hero is Riddley Walker, a 12-year-old 22nd-century Huck Finn. Its hook is language as miscommunication.

The art of writing has been lost and re-invented. Riddley’s phonetic misspellings of ordinary words in his journal/diary produce unintended puns and ominous misspellings and thus misreadings) of words like Parment (“Parliament”) and Hi Mincery  (“High Ministry”) that portend ill for the current society’s ignorant misuse of them.  

When I first read this book in 1957, I had the now-impossible experience of reading a book I had never heard of by an unknown author. It was an unforgettable and unrepeatable experience, and I’ve never lost the sheer wonder of that discovery, even though it has now become the unintended inspiration for all of the sword-and-sorcery fantasies and little-guy-with-a-big-mission sagas that weigh down the shelves of today’s bookstores.

Several things distinguish it from its hapless descendants. 1. It's writing: Tolkien’s ability to change the tone from down-to-earth vernacular to the language of high medieval romance cannot be matched by his successor. 2. Its integrity: the book draws on his own previously created and entirely consistent Silmarillion legendarium mythology to create a different yet familiar world the reader can enter. 3. Its range moves seamlessly from low comedy to high tragedy and effortlessly mixes the mundane with the mysterious.

Readers who entered Tolkien’s Middle-earth in the mid-fifties didn’t know what they were getting into. The fact that we now know doesn’t change the book. It just gives us more reasons to read it.