My Top 6 Books of All Time!

My personal top 6, none of which appear on the BBC list are as follows (in no particular order):

The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox

Nights at the Circus by Anglea Carter

Keeping Faith by Jodi Picoult

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

There are loads of other books I've loved and authors that I read everything by, but these 6 were books that touched my heart, that made me want to read them again for the first time, and that made me want to write to everyone I know, imploring them to read them too.

They all seem to come under the genre of Magic Realism, which doesn't seem to be a widely recognised genre, usually being lumped in with general fiction. In Magic Realism, the story is set in the world as we know it, usually contemporary, but extraordinary things happen within that world that are (usually) accepted by the main characters.

To give specific examples, in The Vintner's Luck, the main character has yearly meetings with an angel; in Night's at the Circus there is a winged woman and a whole array of larger-than-life (but still real) characters; in Keeping Faith, God appears to a young girl, causing her to perform miracles and the like; and in The Time Traveller's Wife, a man travels randomly and involuntarily through time.

I'll talk about each of them in more detail over the next few posts, in the meantime I'm going to try and figure out why my blog is putting in an extra line every time I press enter...