The #1 New York Times bestseller and basis for the international phenomenon that is Wicked :
The Musical and the smash hit movie series. Look for part one of Wicked the movie now
streaming and the stunning conclusion Wicked: For Good in theaters now. 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
