Recommendations
Books Like Stardust
A young man crosses into Faerie to bring back a fallen star — and discovers she has opinions about being retrieved
Neil Gaiman's Stardust is a fairy tale in the oldest sense: mortal Tristran Thorn crosses the wall that separates his English village from the magical land of Faerie to bring back a fallen star for the girl he wants to impress. But the star — Yvaine — is a person, with all the complicated feelings that implies about being retrieved and brought back as a gift. The novel is simultaneously a love story, a quest, and a comedy of manners about a young man's evolving understanding of what he actually wants. If the fairy-tale register, the romantic wit, and the sense of an adult story told in a children's fairy tale's shape gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
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The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
A competition between two young magicians who fall in love against their better judgment, set inside a black-and-white circus that appears without announcement and vanishes the same way — Morgenstern has Gaiman's same gift for a fairy-tale atmosphere that feels both ancient and immediate.
- 2Buy
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman's own most ambitious novel — Shadow is released from prison and discovers that the old gods of every mythology brought to America are living as forgotten, diminished versions of themselves. American Gods is darker and stranger than Stardust but shares its sense of mythology as a living force underneath ordinary life.
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The Princess Bride
by William Goldman
The most perfect romantic adventure in the fairy-tale mode — beautiful Buttercup, her farm boy Westley, and a cast of characters so memorable they've become archetypes. Goldman has Gaiman's same ironic distance from genre conventions and the same willingness to let love be the point.
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Magic returns to England through two very different magicians — Clarke's alternate-history fantasy has Gaiman's exact sense of Faerie as a genuinely alien and dangerous force that humans misunderstand at great cost. The footnotes and the archaic prose style give it the feeling of a document from an adjacent reality.
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman's most personal novel — a man returns to his childhood home and remembers a strange and terrible thing that happened when he was seven. The Ocean at the End of the Lane has Stardust's fairy-tale register and its sense that the magical world is always much older and stranger than the humans in it realize.
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Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
A mild-mannered Londoner falls through the cracks of the city into London Below, a world of shadows and monsters that exists beneath the ordinary streets — Gaiman's first adult novel, and the one that most directly established the template he would refine in Stardust and American Gods.
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The Cruel Prince
by Holly Black
Holly Black and Neil Gaiman are both heirs to the same tradition of fae fantasy that treats Faerie as genuinely dangerous rather than decoratively pretty — the rules, the inability to lie, the moral strangeness. The Cruel Prince's Faerie has Stardust's Faerie's teeth.
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Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
A man who lives in a house that is larger on the inside than the outside is is, who has forgotten that other kinds of lives are possible — Clarke's most recent novel has Stardust's same quality of a story that couldn't be told in any other genre, told with complete calm, as if the impossible is simply the weather.
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