The most recommended selkie books

In this prize-winning novel for older teenagers, Hersey recreates a story of Selkie lore which, in terms of the magical element, remains largely faithful to the original folklore. Teenager Danni’s mother has disappeared, so her daughter sets out to find her. Danni finds herself in her mother’s small Cornish hometown, and soon discovers secrets about her family that are so surprising and hard to believe, they threaten to blow her world apart. What follows is an adventure that enthralls deeply, incorporating fantasy elements into a satisfyingly emotional, realistic story. Stylistically, the sea, selkies, the coastline, and the landscape play important parts, providing an atmospheric backdrop to this fast-moving thrill ride. 

I have to admit, although I know a lot about gods, I haven’t spent a ton of time reading about folkloric creatures, like faeries, brownies, and selkies. This book, set in a gothic old house in the English countryside in the 1850s, definitely made me feel my neglect of the topic; luckily, I got to learn alongside magician John Blake and Lord Thornby as they investigate the spell that’s holding Thornby trapped.

One remarkable thing about this book is the intriguing and clever magic system. The romance is great. And the twist at the end—well, I didn’t see it coming.

Effie, an outcast in her Yorkshire village, rescues a baby from the ocean wrapped in a sealskin and takes it home for safekeeping.

From the beginning, the author shows Effie’s simple existence, her isolation from others, the hardships of her life, and climate, all wrapped up in an aura of magical prose. When Lachlan, a mariner, enters the story, there is a wildness about his interactions with Effie, and you feel the pull of the sea and the girl that Effie rescued.

There is a magnetism that wraps around you, as secure as the sealskin around the baby girl. I fell in love with his romantic fantasy and stayed mesmerized until the last page.

A beautiful tale of first love, summer by the sea, and sexy supernatural boyfriends, Seven Tears Into the Sea is one of my favorite books of all time. Like Gwen, I’ve always felt called to the sea, though sadly, I’ve never been rescued by a beautiful selkie boy. Nor has one ever beckoned for me to return to him. But thanks to Seven Tears Into the Sea, I at least know what it would be like if one ever did. 

With Tales of the Seal People by Duncan Williamson, well, that is like going back to the source.

Back to a time when people sat round campfires and told old stories, and in so doing kindled the deep sense of wonder, connection with the natural world, and also a sense that we are part of that. I was lucky to have known Duncan, so I can hear his voice telling these tales as I read them.

One of my favorite fiction collections, it contains everything from selkies to homework assignments to imagined histories.

I’m drawn to stories that illuminate hidden literature, imagine landscapes, or unearth a secret history. Stories with footnotes, poems, and epistolaries. Tender is all these things, and in the best fabulist tradition, these elements are not the point. They heighten the stakes and experiences.

I love books where the unreal and uncanny don’t distract from reality but create a focus to make a fictional reality more real. In Tender, even stories that appear to be straight science fiction become something bigger and stranger.

Samatar is a masterful stylist, and her prose is outrageously good.

This book is a summer creamsicle of a book, melting down your fist as you devour it. It’s the sun beating down in parking lots as you run toward the water, sand crunching under your flip-flops. If you took Joan Didion’s descriptions of SoCal and crossed them with Anne-Marie MacDonald’s deft descriptions of mother/daughter pathos, then sprinkled it with 70’s childhood nostalgia, you’d get this daydream of a book.

Oh, yeah, and it’s also about a deadbeat parent who may or may not be an ocean deity. I accidentally grabbed this off the library shelf one day and loved it so much that I bought it. I take every opportunity to recommend it. It’s a beach read in the best, literal sense of the term. 

I thought this book was absolutely brilliant. It is a treasure trove of stories and I am sure will be loved by children everywhere! Kate Leiper’s artwork is stunning and the stories are fascinating and populated by Scottish mythical creatures from Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster to the beautiful selkies. Before reading this book I’d never heard of the half-man, half-wolf Shetland Wulver. A kind and generous mythical creature is a rare beast and I’d love to read more stories about Wulvers!

The subtitle to the work, “a Mad Victorian Fantasy” goes a long way to explaining the style of Infernal Devices which follows George Dower inheritor of his father’s clockwork business. Dower bumbles where his father was a genius but that doesn’t stop him from getting involved with time travelers, automaton doppelgangers, and fish people selkies. A romp full of purple prose from one of the progenitors of the term “steampunk.”

This exquisite novel begins with a university lecturer (Too old? Too deluded?) in love with student forty years his junior. She’s an ethereal, white-haired creature, but at first, their love seems mutual, and plausible. They honeymoon in Orkney, where selkie legends begin to encroach on his state of mind. He’s obsessed with her, and she’s obsessed with the sea. The reader is never quite sure if she’s a selkie or not, which resonates with me as I love books where ambiguity is an integral part of the narrative.