World Fantasy Award - Best Novel

2010

China Miéville. The City & The City

Inspector Tyador Borlú must travel to Ul Qoma to search for answers in the murder of a woman found in the city of Besźel.

2009

Jeffrey Ford. The Shadow Year

On New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960's, a young boy spends much of his free time in the basement of his family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. Their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas, and, unbeknownst to her brothers, moves around the inanimate clay residents. There is a strangeness in the air as disappearances, deaths, spectral sightings, and the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car mark this unforgettable shadow year. But strangest of all is the inescapable fact that all these troubling occurrences directly correspond to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.

2009

Margo Lanagan. Tender Morsels

A young woman who has endured unspeakable cruelties is magically granted a safe haven apart from the real world and allowed to raise her two daughters in this alternate reality, until the barrier between her world and the real one begins to break down.

2008

Guy Gavriel Kay. Ysabel

Ned Marriner is spending six weeks with his father in France, where the celebrated photographer is shooting Saint-Sauveur Cathedral in Aix-en-Provence. Both father and son fear for Ned's mother - a physician with Doctors Without Borders, currently assigned to the civil war-torn country of Sudan. This is not the first time she's placed herself in harm's way to help alleviate suffering - and Ned has inherited her courage. He'll need it.

2007

Gene Wolfe. Soldier of Sidon

2006

Haruki Murakami. Kafka on the Shore

Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder.

2005

Susanna Clarke. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that it leaves readers longing for more.

2004

Jo Walton. Tooth and Claw

2003

Graham Joyce. The Facts of Life

Set during and immediately after World War II, The Facts of Life follows the fortunes of Frank Arthur Vine, the result of a tryst between his mother Cassie and an American GI. Because Cassie is too unreliable and unstable to act as his proper guardian, Frank is brought up alternately by his mother's six very different sisters - each singularly idiosyncratic - and by his beguiling and charismatic grandmother. But, as his mother knows, and his grandmother strongly suspects, Frank is no ordinary child.

2003

Patricia A. McKillip. Ombria in Shadow

When Ombria's prince breathes his last, the struggle to rule the whole of the city--both its light and shadows--will rest in the hands of those whose fractured lives align like the lost pieces of a magical puzzle.

2002

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Other Wind

A sorcerer makes a desperate last stand against the land of the dead when he begins having vivid dreams of an imminent invasion.

2001

Tim Powers. Declore

 

2001

Sean Stewart. Galveston

The island of Galveston had been baptized twice--once by water in the fall of 1900 and again by magic during Mardi Gras, 2004. Creatures were born of survivors' joy and sufferers' pain: scorpions the size of dogs, the crying clown, the widow who ate her victims. Galveston forever would be divided between reality and a city locked in an endless Mardi Gras.

2000

Martin Scott. Thraxas

1999

Louise Erdich. The Antelope Wife

Minneapolis has a strong Native presence as well as a potent indigeous past--now Erdich offers a powerful story of life there, suffused with a native American sense of magic.

1998

Jeffrey Ford. The Physiognomy

1997

Rachel Pollack. Godmother Night

In a fantasy world sprawled across the back of a giant turtle, two young women, Laurie and Jaqe, meet and fall in love. They also meet Mother Night, who helps the couple cope with the obstacles strewn across their path by family and society.

1996

Christopher Priest. The Prestige

1995

James Morrow. Towing Jehovah

1994

Lewis Shiner. Glimpses

1993

Tim Powers. Last Call

Set in Las Vegas, Last Call concerns the fate of Scott Crane, former professional gambler, recent widower, blind in one eye--and also the lost natural son of the man who is determined to kill him. In this novel, Crane is forced to resume the high-stakes game of a lifetime--and wager it all.

1992

Robert R. McCammon. Boy's Life

In 1964 in Zephyr, Alabama, Cory Mackenson and his father, Tom, witness a car plunging into Lake Saxon during a pre-dawn milk delivery.  When Tom dives down, he finds a nude, beaten corpse handcuffed to the steering wheel.  Cory sees a mysterious figure watching them at the edge of the woods but only finds a green feather where he investigates.

1991

James Morrow. Only Begotten Daughter

An accident--or a miracle--in a New Jersey sperm bank results in the "virgin birth'' of Julie Katz, a young woman with the power to perform miracles and a healthy fear of ending up like her older brother, crucified long ago for claiming to be the "Son of God.''

1990

Jack Vance. Lyonesse: Madouc

The daughter of a fairy, Maduoc, was switched with an infant boy at birth. The king must not learn the identity of the other child as he would kill him to prevent the prophecy of a royal takeover from coming true.

1989

Peter Straub. Koko

It's 15 years after the Vietnam War and a string of murders in Southeast Asia convinces four veterans of the same Vietnam platoon - one now a doctor, another a writer - that the murderer, whose trademarks are mutilation and a playing card with "Koko'' scrawled on it, was also a member of the platoon. They resolve to find him, for purposes of their own, before the police do.

1988

Ken Grimwood. Replay

Replay is the story of a man and a woman mysteriously given the ability to live their lives over. Each dies in 1988 only to awaken as a teenager in 1963 with adult knowledge and wisdom intact and the ability to make a new set of choices.

1987

Peter Suskind. Perfume

Set in 18th-century France, Perfume relates the fascinating and horrifying tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a person as gifted as he was abominable. Born without a smell of his own but endowed with an extraordinary sense of smell, Grenouille becomes obsessed with procuring the perfect scent that will make him fully human.

1986

Dan Simmons. Song of Kali

1985

Robert Holdstock. Mythago Wood

Holdstock's fantasy of a surviving primeval forest where legends and tribes of different ages coexist draws power from the myths, archetypes and literary conventions it embodies.

1984

John M. Ford. The Dragon Waiting

1983

Michael Shea. Nifft the Lean

1982

John Crowley. Little, Big

The epic story of Smoky Barnable - an anonymous young man who meets and falls in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, and goes to live with her in Edgewood, a place not found on any map. In an impossible mansion full of her relatives, who all seem to have ties to another world not far away, Smoky fathers a family and tries to learn what tale he has found himself in - and how it is to end.

1981

Gene Wolfe. The Shadow of the Torturer

The Book of the New Sun saga centers around an orphan whose lifelong quest transforms him from ruthless monster to savior of a world.

1980

Elizabeth A. Lynn. Watchtower

1979

Michael Moorcock. Gloriana

1978

Fritz Leiber. Our Lady of Darkness

In late 17th century Ireland, Sister Fidelma of Cashel returns from a pilgrimage only to learn that her companion and friend, the Saxon monk brother Eadulf, has been found guilty of rape and murder.

1977

William Kotzwinkle. Doctor Rat

1976

Richard Matheson. Big Time Return

1975

Patricia A. McKillip. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Raised on Eld mountain with only her father's magical menagerie for company, a young wizard is drawn irrevocably into the human world with all its sorrows and delights when a baby comes into her care.