Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

The Fairy Tellers was a fascinating book, and I appreciated the range of tales/writers that are covered in it's pages, and it's certainly put some on my radar that I wasn't aware of before. Jubber has clearly put lots of research into this book, and his enthusiasm for the topic as well as his skill at bringing together such a variety is fantatastic.

Unfortunately, what prevented it from being a four-star read for me was the approach. It was clearly trying to tread the ground between academic/scholarly and conversational/easy reading for a wider audience, and instead it felt like it stumbled between the two more than anything. There wasn't a flow to it, and it meant that it was a very hit or miss book, where I was frequently putting it down as a result, although the subject matter and everything else Jubber did here brought me back.

This was book was really great!! I enjoyed it a lot, loved the characters and the world building. The cover is also so lovely. It was the perfect, delicious, fantasy retelling.

A fascinating, imperfect dig into the people behind the stories. Some are almost as well known as their tales, not least the star of the book's final section, large-handed disaster bisexual Hans Christian Andersen. Others are far more obscure, and part of what the book does well is that even when a certain name is associated with the stories, there often turns out to be a name behind that name. Unsurprisingly, this is frequently a case of a white guy taking credit rather than someone who wasn't, so that we know Rumpelstilskin and the Elves & the Shoemaker as stories from the Brothers Grimm, rather than the woman who told them to the Grimms, Wilhelm's future wife Dortchen Wild. Who, in another layer of guided misremembering, was a young, lively woman living in a town, not at all the sort of aged rustic from whom the brothers suggested their stories were sourced. Similarly, it is the spectacularly bewigged Antoine Galland normally associated with bringing the Thousand And One Nights to Europe, not Hanna Dyab, the Syrian man he employed, belittled, and massively ripped off. Indeed, while one can forgive some of the Grimms' misrepresentation, not least because of how long it took for their hard work to bear any reward, Galland is perhaps the least likeable figure in the whole book – and that's saying something when another of the book's stars, Firebird transmitter Ivan Khudiakov, ends up dying in Siberia thanks to the machinations of the Tsarist secret police. But no, it's still Galland who stands out as the stinker, somehow managing to be a particularly pettish man even for Versailles. His dickishness pointed up all the more when Jubber reminds us what else of Dyab's world has been taken since, talking about a visit to Aleppo in 2012, finding that the city largely concurred with his near-namesake Ibn Jubayr's account in the 12th century: "my abiding memories are of sunlight fingering through the market's lattice-wood ceiling, spotlighting the vendors like actors ready for a scene; of sacks of golden turmeric, piles of kilim rugs and towers of Chinese shoes; and of the laughter rippling over the sloshing of tiny china coffee cups when I found myself in the vendors' back rooms, listening to their tales." All of it centuries old, and now a mere decade later, gone.

Which all sounds like a good read, right? So why my reservations? Sometimes it's just little infelicities, as on Beauty & the Beast, where Jubber does some great work digging out the tale of the tale's author, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, and how despite being one of the clearer cases here of authorship of a story, rather than collection or editing (though as with any act of creation, the boundaries remain porous), she has tended to be erased in favour of her abridger – and you can't even blame white patriarchy this time, given that was Jeanne-Marie de Beaumont. But then he comes perilously close to spoiling it when, understandably not wanting to repeat the word 'beast' every time he mentions the Beast lest the word 'beast' start to feel entirely meaningless, he instead veers too far the other way and deploys the alternative 'theriomorph' more often than I have seen it in the entirety of my life prior to reading said chapter. Sometimes, though, it's a blind spot which feels like a bigger issue. Jubber has his preferences among his material, and doesn't try to conceal them, which I enjoy, but he failed altogether to bring me along with them. That's subjective, true; but when he says early on that the tellers of the ubiquitous fairytales "also gave us hundreds of other tales, many of which are stranger, and more interesting, than the ones that clog up the traditional anthologies", this feels like more of an issue. Because surely it should be self-evident that the only thing making the familiar fairytales seem less strange than the deep cuts is precisely that we're familiar with them since back before we can even remember, see frequent riffs on them, encounter their protagonists on endless merch?

More often than not, though, he gives us good stuff. Sometimes just because it's a cheap giggle, true, as with Giambattista Basile's Tale of Tales, which I always forget was originally titled Lo cunto de li cunti. But enough about Galland! Or how about British chaplain Dr Jeans, who visited Versailles in 1775 yet sounds like a very minor supervillain? But there's also wonderful, not always strictly relevant trivia, like Basile's mate and fellow Giambattista della Porta "who, amongst many achievements, perfected the camera obscura, developed the power of steam and printed a crucial proof – smashing a widespread belief of the time – that magnets couldn't be disempowered by garlic". Casanova meets Gabrielle-Suzanne, "and recognised little more than a housekeeping battleaxe." One of the French storytellers, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, probably comes closest of anyone here to actually living out a fairytale: when her younger husband's family snatched him away from her and interned him in a castle, "she tracked him down, disguised herself as a bear and hid amongst the real-life bears brought to the castle for entertainment."

Jubber is also interesting on the difference between Western stories, which often operate in a metaphysical milieu at an angle to the officially sanctioned cosmos – so ogres and fairies, but no devils and angels – and Kashmir's Ocean of the Streams of Story, by the court poet Somadeva, which incorporates officially Hindu entities, and which is at once the least directly known in the West of all these collections, yet stands at the back of them all: "To read these tales in Somadeva’s collection is to experience the free-wheeling vitality of stories younger than other versions we know, and older than we could possibly imagine." He's assembled a load of information that deepens the reader's understanding of the tales simply through offering biographical and historical hinterland, and then also thought about how the stories' spread and mutation tells us things about the tellers, the stories and ourselves, all at the same time. Probably the best encapsulation, for me, was this passage:
"The strongest stories – the most virulent stories – feed off the nutrients of their new host landscape. We call them 'universal', but that misses the point. They don't resist the particular details of a new setting; rather, they absorb them. The specific and the universal are the ying [sic] and yang that give the stories equilibrium, the balance from which their power is derived."
A statement one could unpack for ages, finding whole further books along the way – marred by that one daft error.

(Netgalley ARC)

This book is a fascinating look into the origins of fairy and folk tales.
It looks at the canon of the Grimm Tales (who of course collected their tales as part of their philological work , Hans Anderson whose work was penned by himself but drawing on a deep well but also many other cultures and traditions.

He roots the exploration of theses tales very much in the culture of the origins of the tales, whilst being aware of the oral tradition that preceded any written versions. He charts changes and variations.

It is a scholarly book which may not appeal to everyone despite its easy reading style.. It is however an engrossing read for anyone who still has that draw to fairy and folk tales..

I went through a series of impressions before I reached the end of this book. When I first chose it, it seemed like a unique book in the non-fiction category. When I started the first storyteller, I was a little alarmed at the speed at which I was reading and wondered if all the information would get absorbed or not. When I finished this copy, I wanted to buy my own copy to peruse later and leisurely discuss it with people.
This might sound like a very convoluted direction of thoughts for the same book. There is a reason for this. I thought I knew most of what fairytales stood for, having read many before the Disney era. It turns out I was literally scratching the surface. The author travels across the world, giving us hard facts and data to show us when and how some of the fairy tales came to be. They were representative of a lot more than just the society at the time of their narration.
There are obviously stories that have their own versions in different countries that seem to have originated at the same time. That is also acknowledged. Each chapter begins with an abridged fairy tale, one that was almost entirely new to me. It is only when we enter the chapter itself that we find out that the unabridged part of the story we just read had a lot more to it than just the plot.
The book is a truly global one. For its size and the number of people the author talks about, it feels like we have a better understanding of the world at the time when the credited authors of the fairy tales so familiar to us now lived.
There is so much fodder for discussions in this collection. A factor that I always look forward to in the Non-Fiction that I read.
It is about the storytellers more than the story, although the latter does get its own time under the light. It is hard to summarize what I thought of this, as is evident by the way I began this review.
I highly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in Fairy tales and their tellers!
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

Thank you to Netgalley, Nicholas Jubber and John Murray Press for free access this wonderful book.

I cannot tell you enough how much I enjoyed The Fairy Tellers. It is full of interesting mini biographies about the creators of fairy tales. I took much longer to read this than anticipated because each chapter led me down a rabbit hole of information. I found myself looking up the cave that inspire Aladdin's Cave of Wonders, discovering the history of renaissance Italy and falling in love with the ladies of 18th century Paris. Whilst the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson are in here, believe me, they are by no means the most interesting of fairy tale creators.

If you have any interest in the magic of a story well told, grab this book.

This is a fascinating book. The author has found a successful format for dealing with his chosen tellers of fairy tales and some variations on their tales. The result is a very satisfactory read. There must be many more "fairy tellers" whose stories are waiting to be told ...

An interesting book which details the lives of some of the tellers of fairy tales from different periods of history and different countries and cultures, comparing their lives and the stories they told, the similarities and differences between them. It also includes a few short versions of the fairy tales themselves for those who may not be familiar with all of them. What I liked most was that it covered some people that I knew of, but also some that I hadn't heard of - even though I had heard their stories, and it was good that they were recognised properly at last.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in return for an honest review.

The Fairy Tellers takes readers on a fascinating journey through time and space to meet the minds behind some of the best-known fairytales as well as some who received much less attention in the Western world.

This is an excellently researched book, almost making us feel like witnesses to the lives of these seven creators, while at the same time providing some great background to the wider historical and social context to aid our understanding of the circumstances in which they lived and worked.

While I had heard of some of these fairy tellers before, there was much I didn't know about their lives and works, and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to get to know some fairy tellers I had never encountered before. As a lover of fairytales in all their forms, this was an absolute treat! It's not the easiest read though, so it might prove tough to get through for some people, especially if not used to reading non-fiction.

This is a well researched book on the history of fairytales from seven authors included in the book.Iwouid highly recommend this book to everyone to read.

First of all, thank you to NetGalley and John Murray Press for this ARC! This review is written voluntarily by me.

In general, this book is really heavy for me (because I rarely read nonfiction) but it is truly worth it. In this book, the author tells the life and contribution of seven storytellers (and other several of them) from different backgrounds and places from his research on them. From my understanding, there are many influences that shape these fairy tellers and their stories. Some of the stories are collected from folks and some of them are their own creation. Plus, their life also greatly influenced their stories.However, even though they contribute a lot to stories that we know today, their name and life are basically unheard and the author addressed this in this book. One thing that I learned from reading this is gratitude. I am grateful and want to say to all this tellers for their stories and other people that contribute to the fairy tales that we heard and read today. I also want to say my thanks to the author, the researchers and other contributors that spend their time making people know about these storytellers. I know there are other storytellers from different cultures whose names and stories are not known yet, and I hope more people will do research on them too. Thank you very much to all of you, storytellers, for shaping many lives with your stories. I am hoping, with this book, more people will know more about all of you and appreciate your hardwork.

This is a riveting and highly informative book that kept me turning pages as I was fascinated by the history behind fairy tales and the people who wrote them.
It made me travel in time and in space and I think that the author did a terrific job in researching and writing this book.
As he's an excellent storyteller I couldn't put it down.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This was an interesting book but i didn't gel with it entirely. The writing was fine but it wasn't always gripping and i lost focus in this quite a few time. The subject area was interesting but it could've been presented in a more accessible way, however this feels more like how i read the book than a general, wider gripe.

I love fairy Tales and so this book was EVERYTHING for me. It was such an interesting and unique read, I couldnt put it down I was totally gripped and didnt want it to end. I loved it.

The Fairy Tellers by Nicholas Jubber is an interesting read about the authors and original tellers of the traditional fairy tales that we all know and love. There's plenty of insight into some interesting and hidden lives here, interspersed with fairy tales from the subject authors.

A recommended read for lovers of fairy tales and biographies of unusual people.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

I really enjoyed The Fairy Tellers, which I was lucky enough to be given an ARC of from Netgalley. Whilst acknowledging that it is virtually impossible to actually track down the originators of folk and fairy tales, Jubber does a good job of building up the lives and stories of some of the most influential and often forgotten tellers of tales. We have, of course, the heavy hitters with the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, but there is also a Syrian traveller and teller of tales, aristocratic French authors, often banned from publishing due to being women, a very unfortunate Russian and a slippery, tale teller from the Punjab who left the most stories, but the least trace of himself behind.

A fascinating look at what we can glean about the people who told the tales from the tales themselves and how certain tales have endured over the centuries by being re-invented depending on the time and the teller.

I read this through NetGalley - thank you!

I'm interested in fairy tales, anyway, so this seemed like a good fit for me. I'm so glad I read it - it was a fascinating exploration of different fairy tale traditions, primarily across Europe, and of the people who actually created the fairy tales. Jubber moves the spotlight onto more women, and more unlikely tellers of tales - including a Syrian traveller. Fairy tales change lives.

Fairy tales feel eternal, but Jubber explores the societies they arose from, and looks at how the people who told them and set them down use their own lives in their creations.

I don't read a massive amount of non-fiction, so it's quite likely that whatever I pick up is going to be something in an area of interest I already have, which means pre-existing knowledge - at times, this can be an issue, as it means I don't find what I'm reading as gripping as it really ought to be. The Fairy Tellers, while hitting an area of interest in terms of folklore, still managed to keep me interested all the way to the end, even if at times I found it a little self-congratulatory (of which more later).

The basic premise of the book is that it takes a look at a number of separate individuals who, between them, are responsible for a large number of what we know today as the corpus of Western fairy tales. The author does a nice job of setting those authors' lives in the context of the societies in which they lived, without glossing over their faults - in many cases, there are similarities between tales, as themes emerge in a number of different places, arguing for the existence of stories from an oral tradition that make their way across countries and even continents, only to have a particular author's name attached once they make it into print.

The only downside, for me anyway, is that the author's tone at times wanders into self-congratulatory 'aren't I the best, I've been to all these places!?' territory, which is sadly not that uncommon for travel writers.

P.S. What a great cover!

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. This is my honest review of the book in question.

Wow! Loved this.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the chance to read a digital arc in exchange for my feedback.