Bøker av Gregory Maguire

New York Times BestsellerFocusing on the Cowardly Lion, the third in the Wicked Years series which started with Wicked, the multimillion-copy bestseller and basis for the Tony Award-winning hit musical, soon to be a major motion picture starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.In A Lion Among Men Gregory Maguire continues to flesh out the world of Oz, seen this time through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion--remembered from Wicked as a tiny cub defended by Elphaba.While civil war looms in Oz, an ancient and tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before she can return to dust, however, the Cowardly Lion--an enigmatic figure named Brrr--arrives in search of information about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West. As payment, Yackle who hovered on the sidelines of Elphaba's life, demands some answers of her own.Abandoned as a cub, Brrr's earliest memories are only gluey hazes. But his path from infancy in the Great Gillikin Forest is no Yellow Brick Road. Seeking to redress an early mistake, he tumbles through a swamp of ghosts, becomes implicated in a massacre of trolls, and falls in love with a Cat princess. Sidestepping the laws that oppress talking Animals, Brrr cannily avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the warmongering Emperor of Oz.A Lion Among Men traces a battle of wits between adversaries distracted by the armies approaching on either side of them. What does the Lion know of the whereabouts of the Witch's boy, Liir? What can Yackle reveal about the auguries of the Clock of the Time Dragon? Is destiny ever arbitrary? Can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets--cowardly, wicked, brainless, criminally earnest--to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they're skinned alive?

The New York Times bestselling sequel to Wicked, the multimillion-copy bestseller and basis for the Tony Award-winning hit musical, soon to be a major motion picture starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.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.Gregory Maguire returns to the world of Wicked and 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.

Gregory Maguire returns with an inventive novel inspired by a timeless holiday legend, intertwining the story of the famous Nutcracker with the life of the mysterious toy maker named Drosselmeier who carved him.Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in Wicked and to Wonderland in After Alice, Maguire now takes us to the realms of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffmann?the enchanted Black Forest of Bavaria and the salons of Munich. Hiddensee imagines the backstory of the Nutcracker, revealing how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how he guided an ailing girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a Christmas Eve. At the heart of Hoffmann's mysterious tale hovers Godfather Drosselmeier?the ominous, canny, one-eyed toy maker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky's fairy-tale ballet?who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter.But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism ties to Hellenic mystery-cults?a fascination with death and the afterlife?and ponders a profound question: How can a person who is abused by life, shortchanged and challenged, nevertheless access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless? Ultimately, Hiddensee offers a message of hope. If the compromised Godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress on a dark winter evening, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized, has something precious to share.

The multimillion-copy bestselling author of Wicked offers a magical new twist on Lewis Carroll's classic children's book Alice's Adventures in WonderlandWhen Alice toppled down the rabbit-hole 150 years ago, she found a Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But what of that world? How did 1860s Oxford react to Alice's disappearance?In this brilliant new work of fiction, Gregory Maguire turns his dazzling 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 of Alice's mentioned briefly in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is off to visit her friend but arrives a moment too late?and 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 see her safely home from this surreal world below the world. The White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts?droll and imperious as always?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. In any case, everything that happens next is After Alice.

"Following a confrontation with her reclusive great-grandfather, the one-time Wizard of Oz, Rainary Ko, the granddaughter of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West, has re-upped in a mission to settle a few scores and right a wrong or two. Her memory and her passions reviving, Rain turns her gaze back to her native Oz. Though the Grimmerie, which she had cast into the sea, retains its arcane power over her, the lover she left behind in Oz proves no less haunting. Traveling companions and arrivistes can befuddle a young witch coming into her own, but Rain marshals a steely determination to stare her troubles in the eye and see who blinks first."--Provided by publisher.

"A delight....[A] funny and warmhearted exploration of the sacred and the profane."--Washington Post"Reading The Next Queen of Heaven is like hanging on to the back of an out-of-control carnival ride--terrifying, thrilling, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure."--Ann Patchett New York Times bestseller Gregory Maguire--who re-imagined the land of Oz and all its fabled inhabitants in his monumental series, The Wicked Years--brings us The Next Queen of Heaven, a wildly farcical and gloriously imaginative tall tale of faith, Catholic dogma, lust, and questionable miracles on the eve of Y2K. The very bizarre and hilarious goings on in the eccentric town of Thebes make for a delightfully mad reading experience--as The Next Queen of Heaven shows off the acclaimed author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and Mirror Mirror in a brilliant new heavenly light.

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.

In this captivating New York Times bestseller, beloved author Gregory Maguire returns to the land of Oz and introduces us to Liir, an adolescent boy last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Is he really Elphaba's son? He has her broom and her capebut what of her powers? In an Oz that, since the Wizard's departure, is under new and dangerous management, can Liir keep his head down long enough to grow up?

Who better to wreak havoc with eight beloved fairytales than Gregory Maguire, the brilliantly funny author of the adult novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as of the hilarious middlegrade series, The Hamlet Chronicles. Zany animals of all species run through these fractured tales with alarming speed and dexterity. Who would have thought that Sleeping Beauty, that most regal of all fairy tales, could be twisted into the story of a frog with a most unusual and promising dance career? Get ready to meet a gorilla queen and a psycho chimp, seven giant giraffes; and one very bad walrus.

A lavishly illustrated woodland tale with a classic sensibility and modern flair, from the author of the novel Wicked, which inspired the hit musical.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 superintendent, a rowdy family of squirrels and a pair of songbirds who broadcast everyone¿s business. Can a dead tree full of annoying neighbours, 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.

Winifred Rudge attempts to write a novel about a woman haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper, and finds herself the object of spectral phenomena as she arrives in London to find her friend John mysteriously missing.

The first in a three-book series spun off the iconic Wicked Years from multimillion-copy bestselling author Gregory Maguire, featuring Elphaba's granddaughter, the green-skinned Rain.Ten years ago this season, Gregory Maguire wrapped up the series he began with Wicked by giving us the fourth and final volume of the Wicked Years, his elegiac Out of Oz.But ?out of Oz? isn't ?gone for good.? Maguire's new series, Another Day, is here, twenty-five years after Wicked first flew into our lives.Volume one, The Brides of Maracoor, finds Elphaba's granddaughter, Rain, washing ashore on a foreign island. Comatose from crashing into the sea, Rain is taken in by a community of single women committed to obscure devotional practices.As the mainland of Maracoor sustains an assault by a foreign navy, the island's civil-servant overseer struggles to understand how an alien arriving on the shores of Maracoor could threaten the stability and wellbeing of an entire nation. Is it myth or magic at work, for good or for ill?The trilogy Another Day will follow this green-skinned girl from the island outpost into the unmapped badlands of Maracoor before she learns how, and becomes ready, to turn her broom homeward, back to her family and her lover, back to Oz, which?in its beauty, suffering, mystery, injustice, and possibility?reminds us all too clearly of the troubled yet sacred terrain of our own lives.

This is the book that started it all! The basis for the smash hit Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire's breathtaking New York Times bestseller Wicked views the land of Oz, its inhabitants, its Wizard, and the Emerald City, through a darker and greener (not rosier) lens. Brilliantly inventive, Wicked offers us a radical new evaluation of one of the most feared and hated characters in all of literature: the much maligned Wicked Witch of the West who, as Maguire tells us, wasn't nearly as Wicked as we imagined.

What happened to those left behind when Alice went to Wonderland?

Maguire returns with the final instalment in his transformative work, a thrilling and compulsively readable saga in which the fate of Oz is decided at last

A unique retelling of the classic fairytale, SNOW WHITE by the internationally bestselling author of WICKED

The third extraordinary novel in Gregory Maguire's bestselling Wicked series, featuring the beloved Cowardly Lion

A novel of beauty and betrayal, which reminds us that deception can be unearthed - and love unveiled - in the most unexpected of places

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 afflictionSet 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.