#stroud

Jonathan Stroud’s Ptolemy’s Gate is the most ambitious and most tragic of the Bartimaeus novels: a book about power, yes, but even more about the human cost of making power feel ordinary. It closes the trilogy by widening its moral and imaginative frame. What began as a witty, subversive fantasy about magicians and djinn becomes, here, a profound meditation on empire, enslavement, memory, and the…

Jonathan Stroud’s The Golem’s Eye is a sharper, darker, and more politically charged sequel than its predecessor, deepening the series’ central fascination with power: who wields it, who serves it, and who gets consumed by it. If The Amulet of Samarkand introduced readers to a magical London governed by hierarchy, arrogance, and exploitation, The Golem’s Eye exposes that system as increasingly…

Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand is a glittering feat of inversion: a children’s fantasy that feels, at times, like political satire, Gothic comedy, and colonial critique all at once. Its great innovation is not merely that it imagines a London run by magicians and serviced by enslaved djinn, afrits, and imps, but that it refuses to let that hierarchy remain invisible. The novel makes…

On Saturday 11th April ill be down The Goods Shed Yard playing some records with the fine people as part of the Jazz Stroud event 2026.

Line up curated by Dubbu and also includes

Rosco

Mother of Mankind

Fidel Cutstro

Mr Mulatto