The Water of the Wondrous Isles
10 best books like The Water of the Wondrous Isles (William Morris): The Blue Star, Hrolf Kraki's Saga, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley, Island of the Mighty, Figures of Earth, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis, Land of Unreason, Wagner the Werewolf, Vendetta or the Story of One Forgotten
| Author | Fletcher Pratt |
| ISBN | 0345298527 |
Lalette Asterhax could not escape her destiny. She was a hereditary witch in a world where witchcraft was banned by ecclesiastical and temporal powers. And any man who possessed her would then gain possession of her precious Blue Star…and all the powers it could bestow. Rodvard Bergelin was a reluctant...
| Author | Poul Anderson |
| ISBN | 0671654268 |
Poul Anderson has long been known for his love affair with the legends and myths of the great Norse heroes. Coordinating, translating, re-telling the scattered heroic literature could only be the work of a scholar and a lover of the genre. That Mr. Anderson also happens to be a talented writer is our great...
After long and patient research I am still unable to give to the reader of these Chronicles the exact date of the times that they tell of. Were it merely a matter of history there could be no doubts about the period; but where magic is concerned, to however slight an extent, there must always be some element...
| Author | Evangeline Walton |
| ISBN | 0020264720 |
Tricked into giving birth to him, the sorceress Arianhod swore that the child should be nameless until she named him...that he should not bear arms until she herself bestowed them...and that he should never love a woman of the human race.
But her brother and lover Gwydion tricked her into bestowing...
| Author | James Branch Cabell |
| ISBN | 1414298250 |
Mundus vult decipi - the world wants to be deceived - and the happier man is one whose desires remain unfulfilled inform all of Cabell's writing. As the chroniclers write of Poictesme's redemption:
"For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle,...
| Author | Carole G. Silver |
| ISBN | 0195121996 |
Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources...
| Author | Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne |
| ISBN | 0330239465 |
This obscure adventure novel, though popular in its time, is quite entertaining, not exactly literature and that term has been greatly overused, a yardstick... if you like H. Rider Haggard who influenced this author, you'll have an enjoyable read. To me a book is good or bad anything else is superfluous...The...
| Author | L. Sprague de Camp |
| ISBN | 0440147360 |
On Midsummer's Eve, as everybody knows, you should leave a bowl of milk out for the fairies. Unfortunately - or fortunately - Fred Barber, an American diplomat convalescing in Yorkshire, didn't take the obligation with proper seriousness. He swapped the milk for a stiff dose of Scotch. So he had only...
| Author | George W.M. Reynolds |
| ISBN | 1840225300 |
Only one of the following 19 things does NOT happen in WAGNER, THE WEHR-WOLF - can you guess which one?
1. A Christian Italian in Turkey renounces his faith and becomes a Muslim to win the heart of a beautiful woman!
2. A werewolf battles a giant python!
3. Skeletons in a closet - LITERAL skeletons!
4....
| Author | Marie Corelli |
| ISBN | 1564599388 |
What a great story. Wouldn't recommend this book to anyone going through marital problems but would recommend it to anyone else. Fabio and Nina are a young couple with a daughter living in Italy in the 1860s. Fabio gets cholera and dies...or at least they thought so. He is placed in the family above ground...
| Author | William Harrison Ainsworth |
| ISBN | 1592240631 |
Ainsworth's last masterpiece, The Lancashire Witches proved a best-seller in its day and influenced many contemporary authors. The Lancashire Witches begins in the 16th century, in Lancashire, England. When a Cistercian monk, Borlace Alvetham, is falsely accused of witchcraft and condemned...
| Author | Joy Chant |
| ISBN | 0345021789 |
When I was a young girl Joy Chant was part of the triarchy from whom I bought and read everything I could get my hands on (the other two being Joan D. Vinge and Elizabeth A. Lynn). So I thought it was about time after all those years to get re-acquainted with my childhood dreams.
As things turned out...
| Author | E.R. Eddison |
| ISBN | 0345272218 |
OK, this one is also complicated ... Not so much the broad strokes of the story, this time, though; rather, it's the structure of the book. Unfortunately, Eddison died before completing it; fortunately, he did leave enough notes to allow the book to be understandable even in partial form. Apparently,...
| Author | George Meredith |
| ISBN | 0814328946 |
Peter Ackroyd's "Dan Leno" includes a lot of scenes in the Reading Room of the British Library - I don't know how much historical liberty has to be taken to find a morning where Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde and George Gissing were all sitting there at the same time. Anyway, it was either that book or his "Chatterton"...
| Author | Jacques Le Goff |
| ISBN | 0942299159 |
A concise examination of the problem that usury posed for the medieval Church, .
In this book one of the most esteemed contemporary historians of the Middle Ages presents a concise examination of the problem that usury posed for the medieval Church, which had long denounced the lending of money...
“Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father.”
This line is to be found at the start and at the end of the book. It is its central theme and is reflected in the book’s title. The quote lies at the book’s core but is then expanded. Starting with the mother, child...
| Author | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| ISBN | 0451525620 |
At the turn of the century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a celebrity—acclaimed as a leader in the feminist movement and castigated for her divorce, her relinquishment of custody of her daughter, and her unconventional second marriage. She was also widely read, with stories in popular magazines...
| Author | Andrew Forrester |
| ISBN | 0712358781 |
In 1864, the British writer James Redding Ware (1832–c.1909), under the pseudonym Andrew Forrester, published The Female Detective, introducing readers to the first professional female detective character, G., and paving the way for the more famous female detectives of the early twentieth...
