Terry Pratchett pretty much single-handedly turned comic fantasy into a hot subgenre more than two decades ago, and while some of the other stars of that era have faded, Pratchett has sustained his eminence. The long and remarkably varied “Discworld” series is of course his signature contribution, but his occasional ventures into other materials —for example, Good Omens, in collaboration with Neil Gaiman, or the Johnny Maxwell trilogy for young readers—have shown that he’s not a one-trick pony.

Pratchett’s latest, begins in disaster. In England, a deadly epidemic is killing off much of the population. And in the Pacific, a huge tsunami rolls across a series of islands, orphaning Mau, a young boy who has been sent by his tribe to a neighboring island to earn his manhood. The great wave also strands an English ship on his home island—its only living occupant is Daphne, a young English woman, about his age. Almost immediately, they begin to misunderstand one another.

Each is of course a creature of the cultures they were raised in. Mau has a head full of the taboos of traditional Polynesian tribal life; Daphne, meanwhile, chafes against the conventions of upper-class Victorian society. At an early age, she was taken by her father to meetings of the Royal Society, where she gained a fair knowledge of science, including Mr. Darwin’s theories. But after the death of her mother, and her father’s posting to Asia to handle one of the Empire’s interests, she has been under the thumb of her very conservative grandmother, who has done her best to reverse the father’s efforts to educate Daphne. Called at last to join her father in Asia, she was en route when the tsunami struck.

Nonetheless, as the only two living people on the island, they are forced to make common cause for mutual survival. Both start off with broken illusions; Mau’s society has been totally shattered, and the European technology Daphne has taken for granted has failed her—symbolized by the misfire of the pistol that she tries to protect herself from Mau with.

At the same time, each has expectations of the other, aligned along gender and racial distinctions. Mau expects a woman to make beer, for example—an art Daphne has no knowledge of. (She eventually learns.) She, on the other hand, has expectations that the world will be rational and predictable, and the discovery that native “superstitions” actually work goes against her whole upbringing.

The relationship becomes more complex as other survivors of the tsunami begin to find their way to the island. First is an older man—who tries to enforce the values of the society that the wave has washed away. Eventually, the imperatives of survival overrule the demands of tradition, and from the two young people’s divergent backgrounds a patchwork society emerges. The island culture is the strongest element—the environment remains what it was before the tsunami, with native plants and animals still in place, and share Mau’s cultural traditions—but Daphne’s blithe ignorance of the restraints means that certain previous assumptions, in particular those about sex roles, can be abandoned without significant consequences.

Eventually, there are external threats to be dealt with—cannibals from a distant island, predatory English sailors who see Daphne as their ticket to wealth if they can return her home. The solutions to these challenges turn out to lie in the powers of the traditional gods of Mau’s people—which, despite Daphne’s initial skepticism and Mau’s feeling of abandonment by his gods, are still potent.

Pratchett’s humor is of course a significant ingredient in anything he writes. The comic elements are somewhat underplayed here, with a dry satire of the Victorian worldview. The other main target of Pratchett’s wit is the equally limited tribal worldview—though, as the plot shows, there is plenty of valid knowledge outside the European compass. Still, the conclusion, in which everything is put right and all end up in their proper places in the world, is essentially the happy ending one expects of comedy.

Highly recommended, especially if for some reason you haven’t picked up on Pratchett yet. Be aware, though, that Nation, while full of the author’s wit and humor, is essentially a more serious book than “Discworld” fans might expect of Sir Terry.

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Gaiman has made his mark almost everywhere from comics to Hollywood, with sufficient regularity to have caught the attention of mainstream media that usually ignore SF. His latest, which won a Newbery award as best young adult book of 2008, is a good sample of how he can take very traditional fantasy material and throw it into new perspective.

Gaiman begins with his protagonist as a toddler, escaping almost by pure luck from a murderer who wipes out his family. Crawling into the nearby graveyard, he is adopted by the ghosts—and since the novel is set in England, there’s a large and varied set of them. They name him Nobody Owens (after his adoptive ghostly parents)—Bod for short.

The ghosts can only protect Bod as long as he is within the graveyard fence, so there he grows up. He is fed by Silas—who appears to be a vampire, and therefore is able to visit the nearby town, where he buys food for Bod. He also brings back books from which the boy begins to gain an education—albeit a very irregular one. With an extended family from every era of British history—including one old Roman, who is convinced things went rapidly downhill once the Empire fell—Bod gets a very skewed view of what human society must be.

Gaiman puts Bod and his ghostly guardians through a series of adventures reminiscent at times of Lovecraft, though with a lighter touch, and with the fondness for pop culture that is one of the trademarks of his work. Ghouls, night-gaunts, and the ghost of a seventeenth century witch are among the characters Bod encounters. Some are very dangerous, and at first Bod needs all the help his dead and undead friends can give him. Eventually, he learns more of the strange world he moves through, and becomes more capable of handling himself.

But the most serious threat—the one that lingers at the fringes of the story—is the man who murdered Bod’s family. His name is Jack, and he wants to finish the job. He knows he can’t penetrate the guards around the graveyard, but he hopes to lure Bod out to where he can have a chance at him.

And, as if by fate, the one thing that might make Bod lower his guard happens. Scarlett, a girl he met years before when she played in the graveyard, returns to town. To Bod, the renewed relationship is both an invitation to begin to take a part in the world of the living and a risk of exposure—though he is not really aware just how much danger he is in. At the same time, his friendship with Scarlett fuels an increasing desire eventually to depart from the world of the dead, despite its macabre appeal (which many young readers are likely to find attractive).

This book, according to the author’s afterword, took him twenty years to finish to his satisfaction. As that might suggest, the resonance and emotional depth of the finished product is something special, even from such an accomplished author.

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Set in Long Island in the 1960s, this tale combines nostalgia and terror, with just a taste of the fantastic.

The unnamed first-person narrator is just about to enter sixth grade. We meet his family: his mother, a wino who dabbles at painting; his hard-working, down-to-earth father; his grandparents, who live in their garage (converted to an apartment); his older brother Jim, and their younger sister Mary. There’s an immediately likable sort of wackiness about them. Mary can adopt a sort of idiot-savant persona called Mickey, who can do complex math at lightning speed. Grandpa, an ex-boxer, likes to sing old songs on the mandolin. Nan, the grandmother, reads fortunes. Jim is both mentor and tormentor to the narrator, as older brothers often are.

In the basement, the brothers have built a replica of the town, using junk and discarded toys to represent the neighbors and their homes. Botch Town seems at first a kind of parody of their world; but as events begin to unfold, Botch Town takes on a kind of life of its own, with the movements of characters there predictive of the real world. The boys realize that younger sister Mary is somehow moving the figures around the model town, with odd foreknowledge of where the real people actually are. How does she know?

Mary’s odd skill becomes important when a prowler starts haunting the neighborhood. At first he seems to be a peeping Tom, but then one of the local schoolboys disappears. The brothers believe their school friend has been murdered and his body dumped in a lake not far from their town. But there is a deeper fear: has the murderer left town, or is he lurking in wait for more victims? The brothers suspect a man in a white car they have seen driving around the neighborhood after dark. Of course, there is no way they can get anyone in authority to listen to their theories.

Ford balances the building tension of the boys’ hunt for the suspected killer against the normal dramas of growing up—mean teachers, school bullies—and the popular culture of the day (pop songs, baseball, TV shows—drawn from various points in the general era, so that it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact date the story takes place). He also manages to capture the character of Long Island, showing the essence of suburban life without falling back on the clichés too many writers use to trivialize it.

The Shadow Year is one of those rare fantasy books that you could easily give to a reader who doesn’t normally appreciate the genre. The writing is strong, the characters are sufficiently rounded to justify independent interest, and the fantastic element, while necessary to the plot, enters the story gradually and without ever appearing so improbable that a hard-headed reader can reject it outright.

A strong performance by a highly versatile writer—Ford has won honors as a mystery writer as well as in the fantasy field.

Recommended.