The New York Times bestselling sequel to Wicked the multimillion-copy #1 New York Times
bestseller and basis for the smash hit movie series starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.
When a Witch dies—not as a crone withered and incapable but as a woman in her prime at the
height of her passion and prowess—too much is left unsaid. What might have happened had Elphaba
lived? Of her campaigns in defense of the Animals of her appetite for justice of her talent
for magic itself what good might have come? If every death is a tragedy the death of a woman
in her prime keenly bereaves the whole world. Gregory Maguire returns to the world of Wicked
and the land of Oz to follow the story of Liir the adolescent boy left hiding in the shadows
of the castle when Dorothy did in the Witch. A decade after the Witch has melted away the
young man Liir is discovered bruised comatose and left for dead in a gully. Shattered in
spirit as well as in form he is tended by the mysterious Candle a foundling in her own right
until failed campaigns of his childhood bear late unexpected fruit. Liir is only one part of
the world that Elphaba left behind. As a boy hardly in his teens he is asked to help the needy
in ways in which he may be unskilled. Is he Elphaba’s son? Has he power of his own? Can he
liberate Princess Nastoya into a dignified death? Can he locate his supposed half-sister Nor
last seen in shackles in the Wizard’s protection? Can he survive in an Oz little improved since
the death of the Wicked Witch of the West? Can he learn to fly? In Son of a Witch Gregory
Maguire suggests that the magic we locate in distant improbable places like Oz is no greater
than the magic inherent in any hard life lived fully son of a witch or no.
