Books That Offer Complete Escapism

The Rook by Daniel O’Malley opens with a woman standing in a London park in the rain, surrounded by bodies, every one of them wearing latex gloves. She has no idea who she is. In her pocket sits a letter from the woman who occupied her body before, and it begins: “The body you are wearing used to be mine.”

Her name turns out to be Myfanwy Thomas (it rhymes with Tiffany, which O’Malley kindly points out), and she holds the rank of Rook in the Checquy, a centuries-old secret department that handles Britain’s supernatural problems. Think MI5, except the threats include the occasional demon. Myfanwy must pass herself off as her old self, survive the committee meetings, and work out which colleague arranged for her to lose her memory in the first place. O’Malley is Australian, and he writes British bureaucracy better than most Britons. The committee meetings are the scariest bit.

Who Sent Clement? is my contribution to the same shelf. Its tagline reads “A tale of debts, threats, and a dead man in double denim,” which saves me the bother of a summary. Beth Baxter runs a second-hand bookshop and is engaged to Karl, whose sordid past catches up with him and drags her into a seven-day, cross-London game of hide and seek. Her unlikely ally is Clement, a former gangland fixer who claims he was murdered in 1975. Readers often call it Life on Mars in reverse. Less paperwork than the Checquy. Considerably more swearing.

Hope Mirrlees published Lud-in-the-Mist in 1926, eleven years before The Hobbit, and it still reads like a secret passed quietly between fantasy writers. Lud is the capital of Dorimare, a smug, prosperous little state that borders Fairyland and has spent centuries pretending it doesn’t. Fairy fruit is banned. It’s banned so thoroughly that it officially doesn’t exist, so anyone caught selling it faces a charge of smuggling silk instead. I like to think a civil servant in Whitehall read that and took notes. Then the town’s mayor, Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, discovers his own son has eaten some.

Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey (the one without the handcuffs) takes place in Chromatacia, a version of Britain centuries after an unmentionable Something That Happened, where your place in society depends on which colours you can see. Eddie Russett is a Red with decent perception and modest ambitions. Doctors are called swatchmen and treat patients by holding up squares of colour, and Lincoln green circulates as a recreational drug. Underneath sits a properly unsettling dystopia, wearing a very silly hat. Fforde’s readers waited fifteen years for the sequel, Red Side Story, which finally arrived in 2024.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry takes place in an unnamed city where the rain never lets up. Charles Unwin is a finicky, routine-loving clerk at the Agency, a vast detective firm, and his entire job consists of filing the case reports of its star investigator, Travis Sivart. Then the Agency promotes him to detective, which Unwin regards as a clerical error in need of correction, and Sivart vanishes. Before long he’s chasing crimes committed through people’s dreams, armed with an umbrella and the Agency’s own rulebook. It’s noir for people who have never owned a trench coat, and better for it.

Not every escape needs a portal. In 1889 Jerome K. Jerome sent three men and a fox terrier called Montmorency up the Thames in a rowing boat, and readers have tagged along ever since. J, George and Harris are convinced they’re overworked. J reaches this conclusion after reading a medical dictionary and diagnosing himself with every disease in it apart from housemaid’s knee. There’s also a tin of pineapple chunks and no tin opener, a scene I’d put up against anything in modern comedy. You can still row the same stretch of river today. The pineapple remains optional.

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm in 1932 as a send-up of the doom-laden rural novels in fashion at the time. Flora Poste, newly orphaned and wonderfully sensible, decides to live off her relatives and settles on the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. They brood. They glower. Aunt Ada Doom hasn’t left her bedroom in twenty years because she once saw something nasty in the woodshed. Flora, armed with common sense and her copy of The Higher Common Sense, sets about tidying the lot of them up. It’s the most restful book here, and easily the funniest about mud.

The Gone-Away World arrived in 2008 as Nick Harkaway’s first novel, and it’s roughly the size of a breeze block. The Jorgmund Pipe holds what’s left of civilisation together after the Go-Away War, and the story kicks off when the Pipe catches fire. Gonzo Lubitsch and his best friend, the narrator, belong to a crew of troubleshooters hired to put it out. Along the way you’ll meet ninjas, pirates and mimes. Harkaway is John le Carré’s son. Make of that what you will; I’ve decided it explains the twists and none of the mimes.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal does exactly what the title promises. Christopher Moore has the angel Raziel resurrect Levi bar Alphaeus, better known as Biff, and shut him in a modern hotel room until he writes down the years the Bible skips. Biff’s version takes in a spell at a Buddhist monastery in China and an unholy amount of mischief. It’s also unexpectedly tender about friendship, which catches you out somewhere near the end.

Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood won the World Fantasy Award in 1985, and it remains the great English fantasy too few people have read. Steven Huxley comes home after the Second World War to Oak Lodge, on the edge of Ryhope Wood in Herefordshire. The wood is ancient and it produces mythagos: living versions of the heroes and monsters from our oldest stories. Time behaves differently in there. A day outside can pass as weeks within. It’s the darkest book on this list, and the one most likely to put you off your next Sunday ramble.

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore starts somewhere far less magical: a recession. Robin Sloan’s hero, Clay Jannon, loses his web design job at a bagel company and takes the night shift at a San Francisco bookshop that never shuts. Hardly anybody buys anything. A handful of regulars borrow strange, coded volumes from the back shelves and bring them back at peculiar hours. Clay, being nosy, starts digging, and the trail leads to a secret society reaching back to the earliest days of printing. For anyone who has ever worked a night shift, the notion that something interesting might happen at 3am is the most fantastical thing in it.

And then there’s Meeting Mungo Thunk, which starts closest to home of all. The blurb opens: “Bathroom scales were not an appropriate gift for his fiancée’s birthday … apparently.” Adam Maxwell, early thirties, has lacked common sense since his schooldays, and one particularly ill-judged decision sends his life hurtling towards rock bottom. Enter Mungo Thunk, a strange little bald man with an unorthodox brand of therapy and rather more going on than first appears. No portal, no fairy fruit. The escape here is into somebody else’s catastrophe, which is a lovely place to visit when it isn’t yours.