The #1 New York Times bestseller and basis for the smash hit musical and two major motion
pictures. Look for part one of WICKED the movie now streaming and the stunning conclusion
WICKED: FOR GOOD coming November 21 2025. 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. 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. "Maguire did something truly remarkable with this novel in managing to inhabit
enlarge deepen and find new dimensions in a world that had been invented by another writer
and in doing so make something entirely new. It’s an astonishing achievement." –Phillip Pullman
"Gregory gets the complications and uniqueness of women very well."-- Kristen Chenoweth "It's a
staggering feat of wordcraft made no less so by the fact that its boundaries were set decades
ago by somebody else. Maguire's larger triumph here is twofold: First in Elphaba he has
created (re-created? renovated?) one of the great heroines in fantasy literature: a fiery
passionate unforgettable and ultimately tragic figure. Second Wicked is the best fantasy
novel of ideas I've read since Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast or Frank Herbert's Dune. Would that
all books with this much innate consumer appeal were also this good. And vice versa." –Los
Angeles Times
