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Subgenres/Fantasy/Contemporary

Contemporary Fantasy

Contemporary fantasy puts magic into the present-day world, often in small towns and ordinary lives rather than city streets. The wonder comes from how close it sits to the familiar.

Parent genre: FantasyPresent-day magic from Edwardian children's books onward5,607 books classified in Saga

Where contemporary fantasy came from

The idea that magic could turn up in an ordinary household is older than most fantasy shelves. One early classic, E. Nesbit's Five Children and It (1902) found a wish-granting sand fairy in a gravel pit in Kent, and spent the book on the comic problems that followed. Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) went further, waking old British legend in the real hills of Alderley Edge.

For adults, the shelf grew through the 1990s and 2000s. Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic (1995) made witchcraft a family inheritance in a New England town. Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996) hid a second London beneath the first, and American Gods (2001) sent the old gods of immigrants on a road trip across the United States.

In the last decade the warmest corner of the shelf has grown fastest. Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys (2012) set a ley-line quest in small-town Virginia, and books like T. J. Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea (2020) and Sangu Mandanna's The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches (2022) found big audiences with gentler, found-family magic.

What separates it from neighbouring subgenres

Contemporary fantasy is the broadest of the present-day fantasy shelves. It covers any story where magic enters the modern world, and it gets confused with its more specific neighbours.

Urban Fantasy

Urban fantasy is a narrower form: a city, a hidden supernatural underworld, and usually an investigator working the seam. Contemporary fantasy can be set anywhere, and often has no case to solve at all.

Cozy Fantasy

Cozy fantasy is defined by low stakes and comfort, and it is often set in a secondary world. A lot of contemporary fantasy is cozy too, but the label here is about the setting, not the mood.

Paranormal Fantasy

Paranormal fantasy centres communities of vampires, witches and shifters. Contemporary fantasy is more likely to have one strange thing happen to otherwise ordinary people.

Magical Realism

Magical realism presents the impossible without comment, as part of everyday life, and comes from a literary tradition. Contemporary fantasy usually treats its magic as something remarkable that the characters must reckon with.

Contemporary fantasy doesn't take you somewhere else. It tells you that here is stranger than you thought.

How it reads

Expect a recognisable world: real places, phones, jobs and family arguments. The magic is often discovered rather than learned, and the early chapters usually turn on the moment a character realises the rules of their life don't cover what just happened.

Tone varies widely, from comic to mythic to melancholy. What the books share is the contrast between the ordinary and the impossible, and many are as interested in how a family or a town absorbs the magic as in the magic itself.

Frequently asked

What's the difference between contemporary fantasy and urban fantasy?+

Urban fantasy is a subset with its own conventions: a city setting, a hidden supernatural world, and often a detective or enforcer plot. Contemporary fantasy is the wider category for any present-day story with magic, including small-town and domestic ones.

Is American Gods contemporary fantasy?+

Yes. It's set in the modern United States and its plot is a road trip among gods who have been half-forgotten by the people who brought them there. It's often called mythic fantasy as well, since its cast is drawn from world mythology.

Where should a new reader start?+

Practical Magic is a short, self-contained family story and a good test of whether you like the mode. For a series with a quest at its centre, try The Raven Boys.

Is contemporary fantasy the same as magical realism?+

Not quite. Magical realism comes out of a literary tradition, especially Latin American fiction, and presents the impossible matter-of-factly. Contemporary fantasy usually treats its magic as a discovery that changes the story.

Does contemporary fantasy have to be set in the present?+

It has to be set in the present of when it was written. Five Children and It was contemporary fantasy in 1902. The defining feature is a recognisable, modern everyday world, not a particular decade.

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