LoveReading4Kids Says
LoveReading4Kids Says
October 2023 Book of the Month
Brimful of ideas, award-winning Katherine Rundell’s epic adventure is set in a world that joyfully and provocatively stretches the imagination as Christopher and Mal, two children with exceptional futures, explore the secret and mysterious world of the Archipelago where mythological creatures, sometimes benign but frequently savage, still live.
Mal’s destiny propels the course of their thrilling and desperate sea voyage on which so much of the future of the world depends while Christopher’s special qualities are also a mark of the vital role he is to play in it too. Both have skills of strength and insight on an heroic scale especially with regard to caring for and understanding the special qualities of all living creatures – including trees. And both are readily recognisable from other fantasy epics such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea sequence.
With her fabulous new bestiary of wonderous creatures with curious conflations of physical and psychological characteristics Katherine Rundell has created a new mythology which is simultaneously crammed with her own innovative ideas and packed with references to other mythologies and imaginary worlds.
Julia Eccleshare M.B.E
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About
Impossible Creatures Synopsis
It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.
A boy called Christopher is visiting his reclusive grandfather when he witnesses an avalanche of mythical creatures come tearing down the hill. This is how Christopher learns that his grandfather is the guardian of one of the ways between the non-magical world and a place called the Archipelago, a cluster of magical islands where all the creatures we tell of in myth live and breed and thrive alongside humans. They have been protected from being discovered for thousands of years; now, terrifyingly, the protection has worn thin, and creatures are breaking through.
Then a girl, Mal, appears in Christopher's world. She is in possession of a flying coat, is being pursued by a killer and is herself in pursuit of a baby griffin. Mal, Christopher and the griffin embark on an urgent quest across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, to find the truth - with unimaginable consequences for both their worlds. Together the two must face the problem of power, and of knowledge, and of what love demands of us.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781408897416 |
| Publication date: |
14th September 2023 |
| Author: |
Katherine Rundell |
| Publisher: |
Bloomsbury Childrens Books an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
325 pages |
| Series: |
Impossible Creatures |
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Press Reviews
Katherine Rundell Press Reviews
'There was Tolkien, there is Pullman and now there is Katherine Rundell. Wondrous invention, marvellous writing. This book is her best yet, and that's saying something. Just riveting, quite extraordinary'. - Michael Morpurgo
'A marvellous imaginative fantasy told with great style and sparkle - a book to race through in a day and keep for a lifetime.' - Jacqueline Wilson
'Katherine Rundell is a prodigiously gifted storyteller and Impossible Creatures is wildly good. Spectacularly inventive, it is both a thrilling and page-turning epic and a clarion call to young readers to use the special gifts of childhood- love, courage, imagination and open-heartedness - to fight to save precious creatures of all kinds before they vanish before our eyes. My Book of the Year.' - Lauren St. John
'Fantastically exuberant, wildly imaginative, impossibly brilliant. Rundell's best, which is something to be marvelled at. It made me want to yell, or laugh, or bite something.' - Kiran Millwood Hargrave
'A rare and remarkable feat of glittering imagination from a truly masterful storyteller.' - Catherine Doyle
'A fierce, fantastic, wild-hearted adventure that roars and bristles with imagination. I devoured it like a hungry dragon' - Sam Sedgman
'One of our most talented writers for children' - Observer
'A menagerie of delights. So packed with magic you'll want to take notes. Impossible Creatures is a world you'll want to move into.' - Patrick Ness
'Flickers with a rare and fierce beauty - unputdownable.' - Abi Elphinstone
Author
About Katherine Rundell
Katherine Rundell is a bestselling author whose novels for children include Rooftoppers, The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer and The Good Thieves. She has won the Costa Children’s Book Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, amongst many others. She was a 2021 World Book Day author and has also published two picture books for children and three non-fiction books for adults, including Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize, and The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure, shortlisted for the 2022 Waterstones Book of the Year. Her books have sold millions of copies worldwide.
Katherine spent her childhood in Africa and Europe before taking her degree at the University of Oxford and becoming a Fellow of All Souls College. As well as writing, she studies Renaissance literature and occasionally goes climbing on the rooftops late at night.
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