The #1 New York Times bestseller and basis for the Tony-winning hit musical and smash hit
movie series starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande 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.
