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Bloomsbury Children's signs 'extraordinary' fantasy trilogy from Rundell
Bloomsbury Children’s has signed a "major" new middle-grade fantasy trilogy from Katherine Rundell, beginning with Impossible Creatures.
Ellen Holgate, head of fiction, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Claire Wilson at RCW. The first book will be published in September 2023. The publication will be supported by a "hugely ambitious and wide-reaching sales, marketing and PR campaign".
"This is the publishing event of the year and a landmark series from Katherine Rundell," said Holgate. "In an exciting and hugely ambitious story from a truly great writer, we have one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read."
Impossible Creatures will be Rundell’s first new middle-grade novel to be published in four years and has been dubbed a "classic in the making". It follows Christopher who, when visiting his reclusive grandfather, discovers a magical world called the "Archipelago: a cluster of magical islands, where all the creatures we tell of in myth live and breed and thrive alongside humans". But the animals are in danger. When Christopher meets Mal — a girl with a flying coat — who is chasing a baby griffin and who, in turn, is being chased by a killer, they embark "on an urgent quest across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, to find the truth — with unimaginable consequences for both their worlds. Together the two must face the problem of power, and of knowledge, and of what love demands of us."
Rundell commented: "Writing fantasy has been a huge joy. Impossible Creatures has been a long time in the making – I pitched the idea more than five years ago, and I’ve found it a magnificent challenge. I loved fantasy as a child, and I love it now as a writer – for the freedom it gives to wholly unleash your imagination. Fantasy seems to me one of the most exciting ways to wield metaphor: so that, in writing about griffins and dragons and horned hares and immortality and flying coats, you might offer children (who have such allegiance with the fantastic, in every sense) a way to fathom their own world."
Nigel Newton, founder and chief executive of Bloomsbury, added: "‘Katherine Rundell is a hugely important part of Bloomsbury’s future ambitions. She is unique, a classic writer who can be re-read hundreds of times, and she delivers extraordinary sales year after year. It is a privilege to publish her."
