I really enjoy fiction that feels like a fable, in tone or plot. They have a simple beauty that feels comforting to read. I just finished "The Last Unicorn" by Peter Beagle, which I thought was extremely beautiful. Other examples I've enjoyed for similar reasons are "The Magician's Nephew" (CS Lewis) and "On Such a Full Sea" (Chang-Rae Lee). Does anyone have something to add to this list?
I really enjoy fiction that feels like a fable, in tone or plot. They have a simple beauty that feels comforting to read. I just finished "The Last Unicorn" by Peter Beagle, which I thought was extremely beautiful. Other examples I've enjoyed for similar reasons are "The Magician's Nephew" (CS Lewis) and "On Such a Full Sea" (Chang-Rae Lee). Does anyone have something to add to this list?
Wow, thank you everyone for the dozens of recommendations. Sounds like people besides me got something out of this question as well. Seeing this list helped me clarify what I like about the fable setting. The books I like most of this type let you see a complicated world through childlike eyes, in some ways helping me do the same in ours. Piranesi was a great example of this — I loved reading that book. Looking forward to a promising CS Lewis book I haven’t read yet too — I’ve read many and like most. Especially “The Great Divorce.” Some of the other authors I don't know who feel promising to me: Patricia McKillip, Roger Zelazny, George MacDonald, Jack Vance, Dunsany. Thank you for the terms “waking dream” and “sense of place” as well.
Really appreciate all the responses! Nice to have a community I can trust for this sort of thing.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgensten fits this extremely well, highly recommend.
The Ursula Leguin Earthsea book, as recommended below, that feels most like this to me is Tales from Earthsea, a short story collection set within the Earthsea universe. It is a comfort book for me, much more than the main series.
Paulo Coehlo writes like this as well--The Alchemist, whether you love it or hate it is meant to be a fable.
Thanks for asking this! I also love books like this and they are hard to find.
All sorts of Arthurian legend stories. I like Mary Stewarts version. More recently Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Uprooted might work. And I've recently been reading everything by T. Kingfisher AKA Ursula Vernon. A lot of her stuff has a fairy tale/ fable feel.
Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Robin McKinley's "The Door in the Hedge". Also her early stuff, like "The Hero and the Crown" and "The Blue Sword". And her chosen genre is various takes on fables; if you like her writing, you can go far with her.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea" books might count. She tries a bunch of different things with the series, but I think at least the first two will fit what you're looking for.
Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series is maybe not quite what you want, but in addition to having so many direct links to fables, the underlying structure is also sort of one, too.
William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" is great, although maybe not quite what you're looking for.
George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin" and "The Princess and Curdie" are old family favorites.
John Steinbeck's "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" is a retelling of Malory, sadly left incomplete by his death.
G.R.R Martin's "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is very Arthurian in flavor, too. It's quite a different tone than his "Song of Ice and Fire" main series (well, except for the Brienne chapters).
Jenna Moran's "An Unclean Legacy" and "The Fable of the Swan" may count, although (as with most of her work) they require some effort to understand, and thus might fail your "simple" criterion.
It's not exactly a "fable", but Steven Brust's "The Phoenix Guards" is a loving homage to Dumas, under cover of being a historical novel extracted from a fantasy universe. It's 17*2 chapters of swashbucking fun and entertainingly exasperating exposition. Don't bother reading up on anything else, just jump in and try a few chapters until they get accepted as guards, and see if you like it. Some love it and some can't stand it.
Totally out of genre, but as I recall, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" had, in its own way, a fairy-tale-like atmosphere. And then you get to read Connie Willis' companion novel, "To Say Nothing of the Dog".
I have not read it yet, but I'm told "The Worm Ouroborus" by E.R. Eddison is quite good.
I'll second the recommendations for Jack Vance's "Lyonesse" trilogy - it's occasionally transcendent, while also having some parts that pack more horrifying grimness into a single sentence than most authors can manage with a chapter. His four "Dying Earth" books are also something you should at least check out, but be warned that you'll be rooting against the main characters at least as much as you'll be rooting for them. (It's so **fun** when Cugel gets his comeuppance, especially when he brings it on himself.)
And I'll also second the recommendations for Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and "Stardust", although his style is not to everyone's taste. And a completely unqualified second for Richard Adams' "Watership Down", which is nicely complemented by this analysis: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/tag/mythopoetics
> Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Yes, all of her fantasy writing is like that. I understand she also wrote SF, but I have no knowledge of her writing style for it.
The Riddle-Master trilogy is her best-known fantasy work, I think.
The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me. You have a person going on a quest and fighting a dragon. The Blue Sword is similar, except instead of a focus on magic and dragons you have a focus on the special bond between girl and horse. (That sounds dismissive, but I like The Blue Sword! But, I like it less than The Hero and the Crown, and I have a strong feeling that it's intended to appeal specifically to girls who like horses, a fantasy story for fans of Black Beauty.)
Other than Patricia McKillip, I don't think I can provide much in the way of good recommendations for work in this style. I usually prefer to have a good grasp of what's going on in the plot.
> The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me.
The plot is, sure. But I find there's sort of a relaxing, grounded-yet-fairy-tale-like quality to it, as if the author tapped into some primal fountain of story and is letting it flow, while at the same time anticipating and answering questions from a bright 6-year old who would keep asking "but why didn't she do...", except that that storyteller was one step ahead. I don't know if that's what the original poster was looking for, but it's what I like about it. :-)
(If you haven't read it, you should check out "The Door in the Hedge"; it's a collection of short stories that are either fairy tales or indistinguishable from them.)
William Morris, though he can be hard going because of his elaborate imitation of mediaeval tone. George MacDonald too, have you read "Lilith" or "Phantastes"? I'd stay away from his realist work, the writing in Dialect prose is excruciating to read.
I second George MacDonald, though I would suggest starting with his short story "The Golden Key". MacDonald has a pretty strong flavor, and if you like The Golden Key you'll probably like Lilith and Phantastes (and vice versa).
Forgot to write this when it happened, but I finished the book a few weeks back and really enjoyed! The relation/clash of old magic and modern society was very well done, and it came together in a very satisfying way. Thanks for recommending.
- A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Not strictly fable, perhaps more leaning towards a blend of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism. But it certainly has a very strong sense of place to it.
Also, Watership Down (more or less). And keeping the tone without being fairy tale-y, Jim Herriot's vet stories (All Creatures Great and Small and the sequels)
Ishiguro - "The Buried Giant" - I enjoyed the fairytale-like quality, amplified by listening to the audio version, although it was just "off" enough that one wasn't totally surprised that the ending didn't have a very satisfying payoff; I thought about it a good deal while I was reading it, but seem now to fail to quite recall it (which is appropriate, actually). In a way, "The Remains of the Day" has something of the didactic fable quality, more directly - "I am going to teach these English something about the Nazi sympathizers in their midst in the '30s" - but for the better the obviousness of the lesson soon recedes, in the reader's mind seemingly as well as in the author's, for the deeper qualities of humor and of character portrait, both individual and national. The narrator, with his limited grasp, can resemble the child in a fable perhaps. I hope that doesn't make it sound patronizing; it is not. As others have pointed out, it is to this character is granted some of the most movingly rendered scenes of heartbreak in 20th century literature. It quite naturally rises above literary fiction - or rather, settles into a lower level, where the best books dwell.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" - I think of it - since "The Gulag Archipelago" would be too much of a read for me, as sort of a children's tale of same. It goes down easy - how brilliant that he chose to render a "good day" - even Kruschev was said to admire it, I believe. It feels very carefully constructed. I guess this may just be my own weird take.
More Lewis - "When We Had Faces" - it was a pretty effective presentation of his usual themes, but also of a myth that those of us with spotty self-educations like myself, missed; as such it was a little like school, but with a clever teacher.
I recently finished "Till we had faces." I've really enjoyed heavy-handed allegorical CS Lewis in the past -- The Great Divorce is one of my favorites. That book, I felt, said something extremely true about morality and human failings, whether or not you believe in the Christian God. But I honestly didn't enjoy this one that much. Part of it was that I didn't enjoy/agree with the message as much. There was some universal truth in it -- something about jealousy poisoning joy, and something about feeling regret for harm intentionally done. But a lot of it seemed to be about denial of divinity in face of evidence, when I don't think that applies to the real world very well. And it was sort of long and slow.
I also didn't realize it was a retelling of a Greek tale. One of my favorite fiction books in the last two years was "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, which fits the same genre. That book I thought did an amazing job of exploring the theme "greatness versus joy" and also the path to accepting one's destiny. Really, really enjoyed.
One Day in the Life is still on the list -- sounds very interesting.
I haven't read "The Great Divorce" so I will read that in return.
Truthfully I think I did like chiefly that "Till We Had Faces" was a myth re-telling, because my education didn't include much in that way. But to be candid, I've rather forgotten it since I (listened to) it last year? I don't think it was the listening - that isn't related for me necessarily although ideally I do a toggle between reading text and listening - but more that it was a bit formless and overlong, and if you are not religious, as I am not, the "now we are ready to be seen by God" or whatever it was, didn't especially move me.
Nice, let me know what you think! It's in some ways more religious than "Till we had Faces" since it's explicitly about the afterlife, but it's much more cleanly translated to non-theistic morality. And felt more concise to me. Maybe I'll read again as well.
Off topic, but I mostly found Remains of the Day to be sympathetic rather than didactic. It's more "how could a decent person make such a mistake and how sad it was when he gradually realized it" than anything else.
I am in the habit of assuming whenever anything becomes an especially popular theme in cultural products, it is probably inversely correlated with its actual frequency/significance. The Fuhrer-loving aristocrat (yes, I'm a Mitford aficionado, I know there were a few) - I guess I see it as more of a device, a sort of cheap device, with which to present a man who has not been his own man, was helpless to be. But it doesn't really matter - it works very well to lure one into the actual story, of someone crippled, emotionally, or rather in his comfort level with emotion and its expression. Someone imprisoned in loneliness and yearning, just a pretty ordinary type in my opinion*, well-realized.
*I've suspected that truly romantic natures tend to be well-hidden, completely orthogonal to such things as Valentine's Day.
Oh yes! Bad memory. Probably exacerbated by, once again, listening to it on audio, so never having it before my eyes. Also my altered title completely gets the point of the thing wrong.
I really enjoy fiction that feels like a fable, in tone or plot. They have a simple beauty that feels comforting to read. I just finished "The Last Unicorn" by Peter Beagle, which I thought was extremely beautiful. Other examples I've enjoyed for similar reasons are "The Magician's Nephew" (CS Lewis) and "On Such a Full Sea" (Chang-Rae Lee). Does anyone have something to add to this list?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Ancestors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloven_Viscount
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baron_in_the_Trees
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nonexistent_Knight
Wow, thank you everyone for the dozens of recommendations. Sounds like people besides me got something out of this question as well. Seeing this list helped me clarify what I like about the fable setting. The books I like most of this type let you see a complicated world through childlike eyes, in some ways helping me do the same in ours. Piranesi was a great example of this — I loved reading that book. Looking forward to a promising CS Lewis book I haven’t read yet too — I’ve read many and like most. Especially “The Great Divorce.” Some of the other authors I don't know who feel promising to me: Patricia McKillip, Roger Zelazny, George MacDonald, Jack Vance, Dunsany. Thank you for the terms “waking dream” and “sense of place” as well.
Really appreciate all the responses! Nice to have a community I can trust for this sort of thing.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgensten fits this extremely well, highly recommend.
The Ursula Leguin Earthsea book, as recommended below, that feels most like this to me is Tales from Earthsea, a short story collection set within the Earthsea universe. It is a comfort book for me, much more than the main series.
Paulo Coehlo writes like this as well--The Alchemist, whether you love it or hate it is meant to be a fable.
Thanks for asking this! I also love books like this and they are hard to find.
All sorts of Arthurian legend stories. I like Mary Stewarts version. More recently Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Uprooted might work. And I've recently been reading everything by T. Kingfisher AKA Ursula Vernon. A lot of her stuff has a fairy tale/ fable feel.
‘The Glass Bead Game’ by Herman Hesse or his ‘Siddharta’
I had to read Siddharta in highschool and it was one of the worst stories I ever had to read, IMO
I don’t think I ever enjoyed a book I had to read as a school assignment.
I meant that among all the many books I had to read in school, Siddhartha was by far my least favorite.
Okay, that’s fine. Reading fiction is a subjective experience. What did you enjoy most?
Hard to remember nowadays, let alone make a subjective ranking, but I think The Poisonwood Bible was pretty high up there.
Mrs Gunflint even has a copy at hand. It’s in the queue. Thanks.
I like Barbra Kingsolver but haven’t read that one. I’ll check it out.
Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Robin McKinley's "The Door in the Hedge". Also her early stuff, like "The Hero and the Crown" and "The Blue Sword". And her chosen genre is various takes on fables; if you like her writing, you can go far with her.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea" books might count. She tries a bunch of different things with the series, but I think at least the first two will fit what you're looking for.
Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series is maybe not quite what you want, but in addition to having so many direct links to fables, the underlying structure is also sort of one, too.
William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" is great, although maybe not quite what you're looking for.
George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin" and "The Princess and Curdie" are old family favorites.
John Steinbeck's "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" is a retelling of Malory, sadly left incomplete by his death.
G.R.R Martin's "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is very Arthurian in flavor, too. It's quite a different tone than his "Song of Ice and Fire" main series (well, except for the Brienne chapters).
Jenna Moran's "An Unclean Legacy" and "The Fable of the Swan" may count, although (as with most of her work) they require some effort to understand, and thus might fail your "simple" criterion.
It's not exactly a "fable", but Steven Brust's "The Phoenix Guards" is a loving homage to Dumas, under cover of being a historical novel extracted from a fantasy universe. It's 17*2 chapters of swashbucking fun and entertainingly exasperating exposition. Don't bother reading up on anything else, just jump in and try a few chapters until they get accepted as guards, and see if you like it. Some love it and some can't stand it.
Totally out of genre, but as I recall, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" had, in its own way, a fairy-tale-like atmosphere. And then you get to read Connie Willis' companion novel, "To Say Nothing of the Dog".
I have not read it yet, but I'm told "The Worm Ouroborus" by E.R. Eddison is quite good.
I'll second the recommendations for Jack Vance's "Lyonesse" trilogy - it's occasionally transcendent, while also having some parts that pack more horrifying grimness into a single sentence than most authors can manage with a chapter. His four "Dying Earth" books are also something you should at least check out, but be warned that you'll be rooting against the main characters at least as much as you'll be rooting for them. (It's so **fun** when Cugel gets his comeuppance, especially when he brings it on himself.)
And I'll also second the recommendations for Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and "Stardust", although his style is not to everyone's taste. And a completely unqualified second for Richard Adams' "Watership Down", which is nicely complemented by this analysis: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/tag/mythopoetics
> Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Yes, all of her fantasy writing is like that. I understand she also wrote SF, but I have no knowledge of her writing style for it.
The Riddle-Master trilogy is her best-known fantasy work, I think.
The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me. You have a person going on a quest and fighting a dragon. The Blue Sword is similar, except instead of a focus on magic and dragons you have a focus on the special bond between girl and horse. (That sounds dismissive, but I like The Blue Sword! But, I like it less than The Hero and the Crown, and I have a strong feeling that it's intended to appeal specifically to girls who like horses, a fantasy story for fans of Black Beauty.)
Other than Patricia McKillip, I don't think I can provide much in the way of good recommendations for work in this style. I usually prefer to have a good grasp of what's going on in the plot.
> The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me.
The plot is, sure. But I find there's sort of a relaxing, grounded-yet-fairy-tale-like quality to it, as if the author tapped into some primal fountain of story and is letting it flow, while at the same time anticipating and answering questions from a bright 6-year old who would keep asking "but why didn't she do...", except that that storyteller was one step ahead. I don't know if that's what the original poster was looking for, but it's what I like about it. :-)
(If you haven't read it, you should check out "The Door in the Hedge"; it's a collection of short stories that are either fairy tales or indistinguishable from them.)
Has anyone said Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny yet? Someone should suggest that one. Let me know if no one does and I'll come back and suggest it.
William Morris, though he can be hard going because of his elaborate imitation of mediaeval tone. George MacDonald too, have you read "Lilith" or "Phantastes"? I'd stay away from his realist work, the writing in Dialect prose is excruciating to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris#Literary_works
"At the Back of the North Wind" is very much a fable, too.
I second George MacDonald, though I would suggest starting with his short story "The Golden Key". MacDonald has a pretty strong flavor, and if you like The Golden Key you'll probably like Lilith and Phantastes (and vice versa).
It's out of copyright, so here's a link: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700571h.html
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is the best possible example of this. Also try Borges and the rest of the magical realists.
I have to be That Guy, plugging my own book. But it fits the ask:
Hundred Ghost Soup, on amazon
Your online marketing worked! Just bought. I have an interest in Chinese history from that era and so this sounds promising.
Why, thanks so much! you've made my day.
Forgot to write this when it happened, but I finished the book a few weeks back and really enjoyed! The relation/clash of old magic and modern society was very well done, and it came together in a very satisfying way. Thanks for recommending.
Thank you so much! Would you mind doing a review on Amazon, please please?
Stardust by Gaiman is a fantastic one
- A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Not strictly fable, perhaps more leaning towards a blend of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism. But it certainly has a very strong sense of place to it.
Oh my goodness a Zelazny I haven't read! Thanks.
That one is super fun. :-)
The moomin books have a bit of that and are pretty good.
Also, Watership Down (more or less). And keeping the tone without being fairy tale-y, Jim Herriot's vet stories (All Creatures Great and Small and the sequels)
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon
I read he wrote that in response to the flack he took for “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”
He started out thinking he needed to write something along the lines of “Jews With Swords.”
That might have even been part of the “Gentlemen of the Road” forward.
Your first sentence made me think of Susanna Clarke's excellent book Piranesi. Your mentioning the Magician's Nephew confirms that.
Thanks for the recommendations.
Ishiguro - "The Buried Giant" - I enjoyed the fairytale-like quality, amplified by listening to the audio version, although it was just "off" enough that one wasn't totally surprised that the ending didn't have a very satisfying payoff; I thought about it a good deal while I was reading it, but seem now to fail to quite recall it (which is appropriate, actually). In a way, "The Remains of the Day" has something of the didactic fable quality, more directly - "I am going to teach these English something about the Nazi sympathizers in their midst in the '30s" - but for the better the obviousness of the lesson soon recedes, in the reader's mind seemingly as well as in the author's, for the deeper qualities of humor and of character portrait, both individual and national. The narrator, with his limited grasp, can resemble the child in a fable perhaps. I hope that doesn't make it sound patronizing; it is not. As others have pointed out, it is to this character is granted some of the most movingly rendered scenes of heartbreak in 20th century literature. It quite naturally rises above literary fiction - or rather, settles into a lower level, where the best books dwell.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" - I think of it - since "The Gulag Archipelago" would be too much of a read for me, as sort of a children's tale of same. It goes down easy - how brilliant that he chose to render a "good day" - even Kruschev was said to admire it, I believe. It feels very carefully constructed. I guess this may just be my own weird take.
More Lewis - "When We Had Faces" - it was a pretty effective presentation of his usual themes, but also of a myth that those of us with spotty self-educations like myself, missed; as such it was a little like school, but with a clever teacher.
I recently finished "Till we had faces." I've really enjoyed heavy-handed allegorical CS Lewis in the past -- The Great Divorce is one of my favorites. That book, I felt, said something extremely true about morality and human failings, whether or not you believe in the Christian God. But I honestly didn't enjoy this one that much. Part of it was that I didn't enjoy/agree with the message as much. There was some universal truth in it -- something about jealousy poisoning joy, and something about feeling regret for harm intentionally done. But a lot of it seemed to be about denial of divinity in face of evidence, when I don't think that applies to the real world very well. And it was sort of long and slow.
I also didn't realize it was a retelling of a Greek tale. One of my favorite fiction books in the last two years was "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, which fits the same genre. That book I thought did an amazing job of exploring the theme "greatness versus joy" and also the path to accepting one's destiny. Really, really enjoyed.
One Day in the Life is still on the list -- sounds very interesting.
I haven't read "The Great Divorce" so I will read that in return.
Truthfully I think I did like chiefly that "Till We Had Faces" was a myth re-telling, because my education didn't include much in that way. But to be candid, I've rather forgotten it since I (listened to) it last year? I don't think it was the listening - that isn't related for me necessarily although ideally I do a toggle between reading text and listening - but more that it was a bit formless and overlong, and if you are not religious, as I am not, the "now we are ready to be seen by God" or whatever it was, didn't especially move me.
Nice, let me know what you think! It's in some ways more religious than "Till we had Faces" since it's explicitly about the afterlife, but it's much more cleanly translated to non-theistic morality. And felt more concise to me. Maybe I'll read again as well.
Off topic, but I mostly found Remains of the Day to be sympathetic rather than didactic. It's more "how could a decent person make such a mistake and how sad it was when he gradually realized it" than anything else.
I am in the habit of assuming whenever anything becomes an especially popular theme in cultural products, it is probably inversely correlated with its actual frequency/significance. The Fuhrer-loving aristocrat (yes, I'm a Mitford aficionado, I know there were a few) - I guess I see it as more of a device, a sort of cheap device, with which to present a man who has not been his own man, was helpless to be. But it doesn't really matter - it works very well to lure one into the actual story, of someone crippled, emotionally, or rather in his comfort level with emotion and its expression. Someone imprisoned in loneliness and yearning, just a pretty ordinary type in my opinion*, well-realized.
*I've suspected that truly romantic natures tend to be well-hidden, completely orthogonal to such things as Valentine's Day.
What are you trying to say?
What are you trying to hear?
Note - the title of Lewis's book is "Till We Have Faces"
Oh yes! Bad memory. Probably exacerbated by, once again, listening to it on audio, so never having it before my eyes. Also my altered title completely gets the point of the thing wrong.
Not a good title, C.S. Lewis!
Also possibly accidentally mashed with "when we were orphans"
I haven't read that one, just looked it up. Might do.
(TBH I liked it a lot less than remains of the day or never let me go. Ymmv though, some people liked it)