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

[j4.livejournal.com]

Hm, my mum's not too keen on crime/murder mystery -- she used to read Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham but seems to have gone off the whole genre a bit in recent years.

I think she's got some Terry Goodkind and Katherine Kerr, but will check.

Sorry to be awkward! :)

Oh, and the Clemens sounds interesting -- she managed to read a lot of David Eddings so I suspect she can cope with apostrophes. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

Warning - These are every-third-word apostrophes! He gets bored of them by the latter end of the series, but I stopped noticing them. The paperbacks are really pretty too!

I haven't read anything by Margaret Allingham, but will say that I've found the "genre" extremely all-encompassing... there's quite a lot I've come across that I won't ever read another book by the same author again, while 4 or 5 others between them have as much or more shelf space than my fantasy section (which was previously pretty much all I read). There are some that would be worth trying to rule out... A random (earlier) Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, Harlan Coben, P J Tracy, Alex Kava (not the most recent one), Tess Gerritsen, Jeffery Deaver, James Patterson (a wide variety of styles just within one author), Linda Fairstein, Carol O'Conell, Karin Slaughter. That's the cream of the bookshelf to my right. They're definitely not like Agatha Christie - us at some point she's loking for things to read, perhaps suggest she get some of those from the library as a trial run. Karin Slaughter edited an anthology of excerpts / short stories from a number of mystery/crime writers that I've got but haven't read yet, called Like A Charm, which includes some of that list.

[rillaith.livejournal.com]

Eek, anonymous? That would explain the lack choice of icons to use. Scuse me :)