The New York Times bestseller and basis for the #1 smash hit movie 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 one of the great fantasy novels 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 political fantasy 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-a fight for Animal rights that 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 Broadway 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 a fairy tale retelling
as unique as its green-skinned witch. What turns a smart misunderstood girl into the Wicked
Witch of the West?
