Books about Newford from Amazon.com

Isabelle Copley’s visionary art frees ancient spirits. As the young student of the cruel, brilliant artist Vincent Rushkin, she discovered she could paint images so vividly real they brought her wildest fantasies to life. But when the forces she unleashed brought tragedy to those she loved, she turned her back on her talent — and on her dreams. 
 
Now, twenty years later, Isabelle must come to terms with the shattering memories she has long denied, and unlock the slumbering power of her brush. And, in a dark reckoning with her old master, she must find the courage to live out her dreams and bring the magic back to life.

Lily is a photojournalist in search of the "animal people" who supposedly haunt the city's darkest slums. Hank is a slumdweller who knows the bad streets all too well. One night, in a brutal incident, their two lives collide--uptown Lily and downtown Hank, each with a quest and a role to play in the secret drama of the city's oldest inhabitants.

For the animal people walk among us. Native Americans call them the First People, but they have never left, and they claim the city for their own.

Not only have Hank and Lily stumbled onto a secret, they've stumbled into a war. And in this battle for the city's soul, nothing is quite as it appears.

Welcome to Newford . . .

Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the grey harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song.

Like Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale and John Crowley's Little, Big, Dreams Underfoot is a must-read book not only for fans of urban fantasy but for all who seek magic in everyday life.

Among Charles de Lint’s most beloved creations is the northern city of Newford, a place touched by deep magic—and the setting for novels like The Onion Girl and story collections like Dreams Underfoot. Now, with the Orb publication of The Ivory and the Horn, all four of the Newford story collections are returned to print. Here, on the streets of Newford, is the magic that hovers at the edge of everyday life.

Return to Newford

Familiar to Charles de Lint’s ever-growing audience as the setting of the novels Moonheart, Forests of the Heart, The Onion Girl, and many others, Newford is the quintessential North American city, tough and streetwise on the surface and rich with hidden magic for those who can see.

In the World Fantasy Award-winning Moonlight and Vines, de Lint returns to this extraordinary city for another volume of stories set there, featuring the intertwined lives of many characters from the novels. Here is enchantment under a streetlamp: the landscape of our lives as only Charles de Lint can show it.

Jilly Coppercorn and Geordie Riddell. Since they were introduced in the first Newford story, "Timeskip," back in 1989, their friends and readers alike have been waiting for them to realize what everybody else already knows: that they belong together. But they've been more clueless about how they feel for each other than the characters in When Harry Met Sally. Now in Widdershins, a stand-alone novel of fairy courts set in shopping malls and the Bohemian street scene of Newford's Crowsea area, Jilly and Geordie’s story is finally being told.
 
Before it’s over, we’ll find ourselves plunged into the rancorous and sometimes violent conflict between the magical North American “animal people” and the more newly-arrived fairy folk. We’ll watch as Jilly is held captive in a sinister world based on her own worst memories--and Geordie, attempting to help, is sent someplace even worse. And we’ll be captivated by the power of love and determination to redeem ancient hatreds and heal old magics gone sour.
 
To walk “widdershins” is to walk counterclockwise or backwards around something. It’s a classic pathway into the fairy realm. It’s also the way people often back slowly into the relationships that matter, the real ones that make for a life. In Widdershins Charles de Lint has delivered one of his most accessible and moving works of his career.
 
A June 2006 Book Sense Pick

A novel of loss, identity, and, in the strangest of places, hope.Leonard Trader is a luthier, a maker of guitars. Johnny Devlin is chronically unemployed. Leonard is solitary, quiet, responsible. Johnny is a lady-killer, a drunk, a charming loser. When they inexplicably wake up in each other's bodies, Johnny gleefully moves into Leonard's comfortable and stable existence, leaving Leonard to pick up the pieces of a life he had no part in breaking. Penniless, friendless, homeless, Leonard begins a journey that will take him beyond the streets of the city to an otherworld of dreams and spirits, where he must confront both the unscrupulous Johnny Devlin and his own deepest fears.