Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a novel about the return of magic to England during the Napoleonic Wars. It is 800 pages long and structured as a Victorian triple-decker novel, complete with a narrator who refers to footnotes that explain obscure points of magical history. The footnotes are real and frequently more interesting than the main text.

Clarke's achievement is to make the magic feel genuinely strange — not a power system or a set of rules but something older and less comprehensible, something that the characters in the novel are themselves trying to understand. The main intellectual conflict of the novel is between Strange, who wants to understand magic practically and experimentally, and Norrell, who wants to possess and control knowledge of it.

It took me six weeks to read and I remember it as one of the most complete reading experiences I've had — the sense of having inhabited a fully realized alternative England for a significant period of time.