New Releases by Gregory Maguire

New York Times Bestseller What happened to young Elphaba before her witchy powers took hold in Wicked? Almost 30 years after the publication of the original novel, for the first time Gregory Maguire reveals the story of prickly young Elphie, the future Wicked Witch of the West—setting the stage for the blockbuster international phenomenon that is Wicked: The Musical and the Wicked films. Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, will grow to have a feisty and somewhat uncompromising character in adult life. But she is always a one-off, from her infancy; Elphie is the riveting coming-of-age story of a very peculiar and relatable young girl. Young Elphie is shaped and molded by the behaviors of her promiscuous mother, Melena, and her pious father, Frex. She suffers ordinary childhood jealousies when her sister, saintly Nessarose, and brother, junior felon Shell, arrive. She first encounters the mistreatment of the Animal populations of Oz, which live adjacent to but not intertwined with human settlements, haunted by a Monkey and receiving aid from Dwarf Bears. She thrashes through her first bruising attempts at friendship, a possible lifeline from her tricky family life. And she gleans the benefits of an education, haphazard though it must be—until she arrives at the doors of Shiz University, about to meet the radiant creature that is Galinda. Elphie is destined to be a witch; she bears the markings from childhood—most evidently in her green skin but more obscurely and profoundly in her cunning and perhaps amoral behaviors, as she seeks to make do, to slip by, to sneak out, to endure, and to aspire.

The beloved multimillion-copy-bestselling novel and basis of the Tony Award-winning musical and movie, in a deluxe hardback edition with green stained edges, a ribbon marker, and an elegant foil-stamped cover. With millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire''s Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as a novel to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum''s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collective memories of the 1939 MGM film starring Margaret Hamilton (and Judy Garland). In this fast-paced, fantastically real, and supremely entertaining novel, Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his own imagination. Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin--no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz''s most promising young citizens. But Elphaba''s Oz is no utopia. The Wizard''s secret police are everywhere. Animals--those creatures with voices, souls, and minds--are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals--even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas. Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication, the novel has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name--one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular, indeed. But while the novel''s distant cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism, mythopoeic fantasy, and sprawling nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency, Maguire''s Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned witch.

A lavishly illustrated woodland tale with a classic sensibility and modern flair—from the fertile imagination behind Wicked Gregory Maguire turns his trademark wit and wisdom to an animal adventure about growing up, moving on, and finding community. When Papa doesn''t return from a nocturnal honey-gathering expedition, Cress holds out hope, but her mother assumes the worst. It’s a dangerous world for rabbits, after all. Mama moves what’s left of the Watercress family to the basement unit of the Broken Arms, a run-down apartment oak with a suspect owl landlord, a nosy mouse super, a rowdy family of squirrels, and a pair of songbirds who broadcast everyone’s business. Can a dead tree full of annoying neighbors, and no Papa, ever be home? In the timeless spirit of E. B. White and The Wind and the Willows—yet thoroughly of its time—this read-aloud and read-alone gem for animal lovers of all ages features an unforgettable cast that leaps off the page in glowing illustrations by David Litchfield. This tender meditation on coming-of-age invites us to flourish wherever we find ourselves.

After brilliantly reimagining the worlds of Oz, Wonderland, Dickensian London, and the Nutcracker, the New York Times bestselling author of Wicked turns his unconventional genius to Hans Christian Andersen''s "The Wild Swans," transforming this classic tale into an Italian-American girl''s poignant coming-of-age story, set amid the magic of Christmas in 1960s New York. Following her brother''s death and her mother''s emotional breakdown, Laura now lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a lonely townhouse she shares with her old-world, strict, often querulous grandparents. But the arrangement may be temporary. The quiet, awkward teenager has been getting into trouble at home and has been expelled from her high school for throwing a record album at a popular girl who bullied her. When Christmas is over and the new year begins, Laura may find herself at boarding school in Montreal. Nearly unmoored from reality through her panic and submerged grief, Laura is startled when a handsome swan boy with only one wing lands on her roof. Hiding him from her ever-bickering grandparents, Laura tries to build the swan boy a wing so he can fly home. But the task is too difficult to accomplish herself. Little does Laura know that her struggle to find help for her new friend parallels that of her grandparents, who are desperate for a distant relative’s financial aid to save the family store. As he explores themes of class, isolation, family, and the dangerous yearning to be saved by a power greater than ourselves, Gregory Maguire conjures a haunting, beautiful tale of magical realism that illuminates one young woman’s heartbreak and hope as she begins the inevitable journey to adulthood.

From the bestselling author of WICKED... When Alice fell down the rabbit-hole, she found Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But how did Victorian Oxford react to Alice''s disappearance? Gregory Maguire turns his imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings -and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll''s enduring tale. Ada, a friend mentioned briefly in Alice''s Adventures in Wonderland, sets out to visit Alice but, arriving a moment too late, tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself. Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and bring her safely home from this surreal world below the world. The White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts interrupt their mad tea party to suggest a conundrum: if Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or if Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life. Either way, everything that happens next is After Alice.

In this tour de force, master storyteller Gregory Maguire offers a dazzling novel for fantasy lovers of all ages. Elena Rudina lives in the impoverished Russian countryside. Her father has been dead for years. One of her brothers has been conscripted into the Tsar’s army, the other taken as a servant in the house of the local landowner. Her mother is dying, slowly, in their tiny cabin. And there is no food. But then a train arrives in the village, a train carrying untold wealth, a cornucopia of food, and a noble family destined to visit the Tsar in Saint Petersburg — a family that includes Ekaterina, a girl of Elena’s age. When the two girls’ lives collide, an adventure is set in motion, an escapade that includes mistaken identity, a monk locked in a tower, a prince traveling incognito, and — in a starring role only Gregory Maguire could have conjured — Baba Yaga, witch of Russian folklore, in her ambulatory house perched on chicken legs.

“Maguire’s work is melodic, symphonic, and beautiful; it is dejected and biting and brave. How great that people flock to these magical novels.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review Bestselling author Gregory Maguire’s remarkable series, The Wicked Years, comes full circle with this, his fourth and final excursion across a darker, richer, more complex landscape of “the magical land of Oz.” Out of Oz brilliantly reimagines L. Frank Baum’s world over the rainbow as wracked with social unrest—placing Glinda the good witch under house arrest and having the cowardly Lion on the lam from the law as the Emerald City prepares to make war on Munchkinland. Even Dorothy makes a triumphant return in Maguire’s magnificent Oz finale—tying up every loose green end of the series he began with his classic Wicked, the basis for the smash hit Broadway musical.

The year is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives perched high above the rolling hills and valleys of Tuscany and Umbria at Montefiore, the farm of her beloved father, Don Vicente. One day a noble entourage makes its way up the winding slopes to the farm—and the world comes to Montefiore. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia—decadent children of a wicked pope—no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a year''s quest to reclaim a relic of the original Tree of Knowledge, he leaves Bianca under the care, so to speak, of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but in the dark forest there can be found salvation as well. . . . A lyrical work of stunning creative vision, Mirror Mirror gives fresh life to the classic story of Snow White—and has a truth and beauty all its own.

While civil war looms in Oz, Brrr—the Cowardly Lion—surrenders the story of his life to a tetchy oracle named Yackle. Abandoned as a cub, Brrr''s path from infancy in the Great Gillikan Forest is no Yellow Brick Road. Seeking to redress an early mistake, he trudges through a swamp of ghosts, becomes implicated in a massacre of trolls, falls in love with a forbidding Cat princess, and avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the war-mongering Emperor of Oz. A portrait of a would-be survivor and a panoramic glimpse of a world gone shrill with war fever, Gregory Maguire''s A Lion Among Men is written with the sympathy and power that have made his books contemporary classics.

Alice''s life is about to change. She''s a skinny orphan. She''s never been able to hear too well. And she can''t speak too well, either. The only person who seems to care for her—one of the nuns at the orphanage—gets taken away from Alice in a freak accident. And then one day somebody calls Alice by the wrong name. Miami, she says. Miami Shaw. Miami Shaw, who may be Alice''s twin sister. Who lives only a few miles away. Who has what Alice has always dreamed of—a whole wonderful family. But is there a place in that family for Alice? From bestselling author Gregory Maguire comes a funny, heartrending story of the strength of sisterhood and the struggle to find a family of one''s own.

The long-anticipated sequel to the beloved and hugely successful novel Wicked. When a Witch dies—not as a crone, withered and incapable, but as a woman in her prime, at the height of her passion and prowess—too much is left unsaid. What might have happened had Elphaba lived? Of her campaigns in defense of the Animals, of her appetite for justice, of her talent for magic itself, what good might have come? If every death is a tragedy, the death of a woman in her prime keenly bereaves the whole world. Ten years after the publication of Wicked, bestselling novelist Gregory Maguire returns to the land of Oz to follow the story of Liir, the adolescent boy left hiding in the shadows of the castle when Dorothy did in the Witch. A decade after the Witch has melted away, the young man Liir is discovered bruised, comatose, and left for dead in a gully. Shattered in spirit as well as in form, he is tended by the mysterious Candle, a foundling in her own right, until failed campaigns of his childhood bear late, unexpected fruit. Liir is only one part of the world that Elphaba left behind. As a boy hardly in his teens, he is asked to help the needy in ways in which he may be unskilled. Is he Elphaba’s son? Has he power of his own? Can he liberate Princess Nastoya into a dignified death? Can he locate his supposed half-sister, Nor, last seen in shackles in the Wizard’s protection? Can he survive in an Oz little improved since the death of the Wicked Witch of the West? Can he learn to fly? In Son of a Witch, Gregory Maguire suggests that the magic we locate in distant, improbable places like Oz is no greater than the magic inherent in any hard life lived fully, son of a witch or no.

Is this new land a place where magics really happen? From Gregory Maguire, the acclaimed author of Wicked, comes his much-anticipated second novel, a brilliant and provocative retelling of the timeless Cinderella tale. In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings.... When we grow up, we learn that it''s far more common for human beings to turn into rats.... We all have heard the story of Cinderella, the beautiful child cast out to slave among the ashes. But what of her stepsisters, the homely pair exiled into ignominy by the fame of their lovely sibling? What fate befell those untouched by beauty . . . and what curses accompanied Cinderella''s exquisite looks? Extreme beauty is an affliction Set against the rich backdrop of seventeenth-century Holland, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister tells the story of Iris, an unlikely heroine who finds herself swept from the lowly streets of Haarlem to a strange world of wealth, artifice, and ambition. Iris''s path quickly becomes intertwined with that of Clara, the mysterious and unnaturally beautiful girl destined to become her sister. Clara was the prettiest child, but was her life the prettiest tale? While Clara retreats to the cinders of the family hearth, burning all memories of her past, Iris seeks out the shadowy secrets of her new household--and the treacherous truth of her former life. God and Satan snarling at each other like dogs.... Imps and fairy godmotbers trying to undo each other''s work. How we try to pin the world between opposite extremes! Far more than a mere fairy-tale, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is a novel of beauty and betrayal, illusion and understanding, reminding us that deception can be unearthed--and love unveiled--in the most unexpected of places.

When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum''s classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability, and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West—a smart, prickly, and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn''t so wicked after all. Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Gregory Maguire just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature.