Author(s): Katherine Rundell

Senior Fiction | Fantasy & Magic

It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.

A boy called Christopher is visiting his reclusive grandfather when he witnesses an avalanche of mythical creatures come tearing down the hill. This is how Christopher learns that his grandfather is the guardian of one of the ways between the non-magical world and a place called the Archipelago, a cluster of magical islands where all the creatures we tell of in myth live and breed and thrive alongside humans.

They have been protected from being discovered for thousands of years; now, terrifyingly, the protection has worn thin, and creatures are breaking through.

Then a girl, Mal, appears in Christopher's world. She is in possession of a flying coat, is being pursued by a killer and is herself in pursuit of a baby griffin. Mal, Christopher and the griffin 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.

Review: There was Tolkien, there is Pullman and now there is Katherine Rundell. Wondrous invention, marvellous writing. This book is her best yet, and that's saying something. Just riveting, quite extraordinary. * Michael Morpurgo *
A marvellous imaginative fantasy told with great style and sparkle - a book to race through in a day and keep for a lifetime. * Jacqueline Wilson *
Katherine Rundell is a phenomenon. She not only understands what fantasy is for and why children (and the rest of us) need it, but she crafts original and brilliant books that delight readers of all ages and kinds, while stretching our minds and filling our hearts. * Neil Gaiman *
Katherine Rundell is a prodigiously gifted storyteller and IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES is wildly good. Spectacularly inventive, it is both a thrilling and page-turning epic and a clarion call to young readers to use the special gifts of childhood- love, courage, imagination and open-heartedness - to fight to save precious creatures of all kinds before they vanish before our eyes. My Book of the Year. * Lauren St. John *
Fantastically exuberant, wildly imaginative, impossibly brilliant. Rundell's best, which is something to be marvelled at. It made me want to yell, or laugh, or bite something. * Kiran Millwood Hargrave *
A rare and remarkable feat of glittering imagination from a truly masterful storyteller. * Catherine Doyle *
A fierce, fantastic, wild-hearted adventure that roars and bristles with imagination. I devoured it like a hungry dragon * Sam Sedgman *
One of our most talented writers for children * Observer *
A menagerie of delights. So packed with magic you'll want to take notes. Impossible Creatures is a world you'll want to move into. * Patrick Ness *
Between the covers of Impossible Creatures is a world as enchanting, as perilous, as richly imagined as Narnia or Middle Earth. * Frank Cottrell-Boyce *
Flickers with a rare and fierce beauty - unputdownable. * Abi Elphinstone *

Author Biography: Katherine Rundell is a multi-million-bestselling author whose novels for children have won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children's Book Award, among many others. She is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College and a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, where she works on Renaissance literature. Her books for adults include Super-Infinite, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize. Very occasionally she goes climbing across the rooftops of Oxford, late at night.