June's recommendation: Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman.
In the fall of 2006, I presented a paper at the American Folklore Society's annual meeting, about the fairy-tale structure of Gaiman's novel Stardust. The woman in charge of my panel appeared to be the only person in the room who knew much, if anything, about Gaiman -- we didn't have a lot of people there, it being an 8:30 panel on a Saturday morning -- and so, during the question-and-answer session at the end that turned out to have no questions, she started evangelizing about how they should all be reading Gaiman, and you could do an entire panel of papers about what he does with folklore.
It's true, though it would be interesting to see which of those papers came to praise him, and which not. I'm not good enough with post-colonial theory or what have you to have an informed opinion about his habit of tinkering around with Japanese kitsune folklore (The Dream Hunters) or Afro-Caribbean stories of Anansi (this book). An informed opinion might find some problems in the way he handles such things. My opinion, unformed as it is, finds them wonderful, but I'm also a cultural dilettante who likes to know a bit about a lot of places, rather than a lot about a few places.
And Anansi Boys appeals to me not just because it makes use of myths that haven't already been strip-mined in fantasy, but because it's about stories and songs (which aren't necessarily distinct from one another). That's a theme I can get behind. Plus I've always been a fan of Gaiman's style: witty in that dry British way, with a collision of normalcy and the fantastic that makes the latter all the more fantastical, without ever letting it fly too far away from a good, solid, realistic foundation. Several of the blurbs on my copy refer to the book as being "scary" in places, which I entirely disagree with. Creepy, yes, but not frightening. Unless you find myths frightening, which in some ways I suppose you should.
The story centers on a fellow named Fat Charlie Nancy, who's not particularly fat and hasn't been for years, but his father nicknamed him that, and when his father nicknames something, it stays nicknamed. That's because, as you learn more or less immediately, Fat Charlie's father was Anansi, the African trickster spider god. Now Anansi's kicked the bucket -- well and truly dead -- and Charlie finds out that apparently he has a brother he never knew about, a fellow named Spider. On a whim, Charlie gets in touch with Spider, and of course it all goes downhill from there, because Spider's cooler, suaver, and handsomer than Charlie, and kind of controls reality to boot. There was a section of the book where I expected to end up detesting Spider, but the story went in directions that changed my mind, which I approve of.
One thing that interested me was, early on in the book, I found myself wondering whether certain characters were black or white. After a while, I noticed that Gaiman identified certain characters as white, and I came to the conclusion that, unless he said otherwise, I was supposed to assume a person was black. The fact that I had that temporary confusion, and that I ended up feeling a little bit odd about it, says quite a bit, without being preachy, about the default settings in our literature, fantasy and otherwise. Marked and unmarked categories, indeed.
The conclusion of the novel is a little diffuse, though I don't consider it bad (contrary to some friends' opinions of American Gods; I don't remember how that book ended, so I couldn't say). It's not a terrible kind of diffuse, just the result of having a cast that's more ensemble than you expect at first. Fat Charlie's the main character, certainly, but Spider and Rosie and Daisy and Grahame Coats and other people end up being fairly central, and protagonists in their own right. When the situation's like that, I suppose one should expect them to be active in the conclusion of various plots, rather than standing around while the main character does everything. Different from how things run in a lot of fantasy, but that doesn't make it bad.
On a semi-random closing note: apparently the audiobook of this novel is fabulous, being read by Lenny Henry, an English comedian of Jamaican descent who has precisely the kind of accent the story and characters need. Even if you're not usually an audiobook kind of person, you might want to consider, not reading this novel, but listening to it, for that added layer of flavor.