Guessed authors

[j4]

It's my mum's birthday in August, and she usually has a book wish-list which she gives to my dad, my sister and me in case we can't think of anything else to buy her. Now while I don't really mind buying stuff off the list, a) it seems a bit daft given that she's quite happy to buy them for herself anyway, and b) there's always a lot of faff between the three of us as to who buys what, sometimes resulting in duplicate copies. I'd quite like to get her something that she wouldn't buy for herself, i.e. something she might not even know exists, but should like anyway.

So, knowing that there are a fair few SF/Fantasy geeks reading this, I'm turning to you guys for help. Things I know she has read and enjoyed recently:

[edited to include suggestions that I know she's already got/read]

• Pratchett (funny how it's always the obvious ones you forget to mention)
• Katherine Kerr (? I think she's got some of these)
• Terry Goodkind
• Ursula Le Guin
• Mercedes Lackey
• Raymond Feist
• Julia Gray, The Guardian Cycle series
• Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time series
• Guy Gavriel Kay, pretty much everything AFAICT
• Robin Hobb, "Assassin" / "Fool" series
• Marion Zimmer Bradley
• Sheri S. Tepper
• Barbara Hambly
• Elizabeth Moon
• Diana Wynne Jones
• "Bridget Jones" :-)

Can anybody recommend anything that someone who's liked all these might enjoy? (Apologies in advance if I end up saying "I think she's got/read that", I can't remember everything that's on her shelves...) Ideally I want to avoid authors she's already buying everything by, because it's just too easy to duplicate stuff.

NB it doesn't have to be Fantasy (you know I don't really do genre anyway!) but she doesn't read that much SF and I've not had that much success finding non-genre things that she likes... at least, I lent her a huge stack of books a while ago and she wasn't wildly enthusiastic about any of them. Open to suggestions, though.

Comments

[taimatsu]

Haven't read Faerie Tale, might have to do so :)

I am too inexperienced with SF to be able to tell where something falls on the soft-hard spectrum; Robert may be able to be more specific. I'll type the blurb from the first book for you, though, and you can judge.

TITAN: a world inside a world.

Outside it was a vast, wheel-shaped construct orbiting Saturn; inside -- it was impossible, bizarre, an endless landscape inhabited by creatures out of legend.

And it had captured the crew of a NASA probe.

'Fine reading -- an exciting story...with a science fiction setting which is both awesome and unusually well-devised.' - Poul Anderson

It's probably got quite a hard SF setting, but the meat of the book is about people reacting to their environment, and discovering an organic world (as opposed to discovering fantastic technology or mystifying machines).