The sky weeps, the wind howls and the natural world is conscious and responds to our actions. Pathetic fallacy it may be, but it is ingrained into the way we see and describe the world. Robin Hobb, best known for her Farseer Trilogy, which included Assassin’s Apprentice, plays with this ancient concept.

The first book of The Soldier Son trilogy, Shaman’s Crossing, had its hero Navarre describe how his dutiful ambitions to become an officer in the elite Academy of the Gernian Army was thwarted by losing half his spirit to Tree Woman, a kind of green goddess of the forest-dwelling Speck people.

Despised by Gernians as freaks and savages, both for their weird mottled skin and for their shameless carnal lusts, the Specks are being driven from their ancestral lands by the rational, inflexible Gernian elite.

Navarre, a golden boy of his own culture, found to his horror that he became a kind of Trojan horse for the natives. By day, he battled with bullying (or “hazing” — all too familiar to trainee officers) and by night his dreams were saturated with the passionate, guilty love for Tree Woman which caused him to help the enemy.

At the end of the book, he enters the spirit world and kills her, thus saving his best friend and many others from a deadly disease deliberately spread by the Specks.

In Forest Mage green goddesses are not so easy to destroy, however, and magic in Hobb’s world is always double-edged. As Navarre tries to ignore his own attraction both to the persecuted Specks and to his own increasing magical powers, he becomes monstrously obese and discovers that “I am treated as if I am these walls of fat rather than the person trapped behind them”.

This is a gloriously original touch, and typical of one of the most fascinating fantasy writers alive. The Soldier Son can be read as a political satire on American military aggression, but on a more personal level it is profoundly perceptive about the challenge faced by the honourable, brave and good.

Navarre is a true hero, even when everyone he knows despises and rejects him as a lazy glutton, but his natural appetites make him real and rounded. His repulsive father and selfish fiancée each treat him with cruelty, and in his anger he makes magical prophecies which, to his horror, unwittingly bring about revenge.

Cast out of the academy, then out of polite society, he travels to the edge of the Gernian empire to scrape a living as a gravedigger.

Despised by Gernians, but worshipped by the Specks, he is torn between vivid sensuality and cool reason.

My favourite scene is when, unjustly condemned to death, he is rescued by Tree Woman’s dying strength as she sends roots from miles away to smash down his prison walls. Rich in character and plot, and 900 pages long, this is the kind of fantasy that Anthony Trollope would have written if he lived now.

For younger children, Lauren St John’s debut, The White Giraffe, plays on a natural magic rooted in African myth. Orphaned Martine is sent to live with her unwelcoming grandmother on a South African game reserve. Lonely and isolated at school, she begins to see the legendary white giraffe and — once it trusts her enough to let her ride on its back — discovers its secret hiding place.

Haunted by mysterious dreams, Martine is a child of prophecy, and has to expose a corrupt game warden to protect not only the white giraffe but a number of other wild animals. It’s been a long time since a children’s author dared to write about Africa, let alone South Africa, but this is a really charming and thrilling story, written with grace and poise.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy