The best books to get lost in a world of wonders

Piranesi spoke deeply to me of the miraculous in the everyday. Clarke conjures a world so complete that, strange and sorrowful, severe and lonely as it is, you feel Piranesi’s attachment—and later his grief, when he learns the truth. For we’ve seen this world through his eyes: an infinite House, invaded by the sea, peopled by none other and visited by only one other—but full of wonders. Even as he suffers, Piranesi writes: The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite, and his diary records its beauties daily. “I am the Beloved Child of the House,” he says; and believing this, in his innocence and will to survive, he transforms both the simplest and harshest moments of the House into a bright, magical realm.

I picked up this book because of its gorgeous front cover. Reading the back cover, I was instantly mesmerized. Such ravishing words! And such a strange notion. What would happen if suddenly, mammoth trees shot up and filled every space, splintering and sweeping houses, shops, gas stations, and roads up into their inexorable, growing, entwined branches? Civilization is shattered—electricity, running water, communications, all gone—and in its place is an endless forest. This is a story of apocalypse like no other, lovely and terrible in equal measure. Our extremely reluctant hero, Adrien, must learn to not just survive in the world of the trees, but to find its magic, and to help humanity have a proper place in it. Mythical and deeply philosophical.

This sweet portal fantasy explores the tender terrain of the human heart. During an outbreak, Tom is sent to live with his aunt and uncle—in a big house with no playmates and no garden. Lonely and pining, Tom stumbles into an earlier time, when the house had massive, glorious gardens, and a child his own age. He’s a kind of ghost there, but he and Hatty are real to each other... until time and growing up begins to rob them of what they had, and brings their two worlds together in a bittersweet, joyful-and-tearful ending. I first read the book as an adult, but wished I’d discovered it as a child, when it would have forever emblazoned my heart the way childhood magic does.

Like so many others, my imagination was ignited by these books. Pullman created a solid world, so like our own in past times that it evokes wistful nostalgia, but so unique that it awakens an awed wonder. I adored the steampunk setting and all the time spent in academic environs. At the centre of it is a scrappy, young heroine who, for all her flaws, we fall in love with, and we enter wholeheartedly into her troubled journey. If that weren’t enough, the books explore deep, philosophical issues of relationships, power structures, and the very nature of being. When you finish the trilogy, you wake, as if from a dream... which you wish would never end.

Having lived, in my youth, high in the Bolivian Andes, I was drawn to this tale, set mainly in the Peruvian cordilleras. And who can resist a book with “bedlam” in the title? Pulley invents an extraordinary world, rooted in ancient lore, but in detail invented, strange, magical, and compelling. Loving wordcraft sweeps you into a reality where you are just as confused as the protagonist, Merrick, stumbling his way through a dreamlike, unforgiving realm. Like Merrick, who is living in a culture he knows little of, we often aren’t sure what happened or why. And all the time, a friendship slowly grows between Merrick and Raphael, his guide and host—a friendship that will be tested by the inexorable workings of time-out-of-time.