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.
