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

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I utterly loved "A Rire Upon the Deep", so it's definitely different folks, different strokes. But that was very much an ideas-based SF novel.

Umm, I'm wondering why young Master Pratchett hasn't been mentioned.

[j4.livejournal.com]

very much an ideas-based SF novel

The problem was more that I found all the characters so unsympathetic and generally irritating that I wish they'd all hurry up and die. (Except the wolves. They were okay, and I was interested in the way language was used to speak about/through the hive mind. But the rollerskating pot-plants annoyed me even more than Philip Pullman's cows-on-wheels.) The ideas might have caught my interest more with a less infuriating cast, but perhaps they were part of the point? Or perhaps I just didn't understand any of it? Maybe I didn't have enough SF context to grok it? I don't know. But I really can't think of many books that I've found as thoroughly unrewarding as that one.

(Mind you, it possibly didn't help that at the time when I read it I had about 30 people telling me it was absolutely The. Best. Book. Ever. -- not many things stand up to that sort of hype!)

Umm, I'm wondering why young Master Pratchett hasn't been mentioned.

Possibly everybody (rightly) assumed that everybody who's been in a bookshop in the past 10 years already knows about him? ;-) (It was my mum who got me reading Pratchett...)