Emily Croy Barker

Emily Croy Barker is an American writer and journalist. Her debut novel, The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (2013), was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel; it follows a graduate student who stumbles into a hidden magical world and must survive its politics, manners, and dangers. She continued the story in How to Talk to a Goddess (2021). Barker has said the novel grew out of a daydream about an enchanted woman being told to snap out of her trance, and that trips to Maine and to a Breton village near a castle shaped its settings. An avowed admirer of Jane Austen, she gives her heroine a similarly sharp, observant voice even as the story turns toward portal fantasy and folklore-inflected magic.