The Lost Magician by Piers Torday

Title: The Lost Magician

Author: Piers Torday

Genre: Fantasy/Historical Fiction/Magical Realism

Publisher: Quercus

Published: 7th May 2019

Format: Paperback

Pages: 340

Price: $15.99

Synopsis: ‘If you can imagine it, it exists … somewhere.’ The new spellbinding fantasy adventure from the bestselling, award-winning author of THE LAST WILD trilogy.

‘If you can imagine it, it exists … somewhere.’  The new spellbinding fantasy adventure from the bestselling, award-winning author of THE LAST WILD trilogy.

1945. They have survived the Blitz, but when Simon, Patricia, Evelyn and Larry step through a mysterious library door, it is the beginning of their most dangerous adventure yet. They discover the magical world of Folio, where an enchanted kingdom of fairy knights, bears and tree gods is under threat from a sinister robot army.

The many stories of the Library are locked in eternal war, and the children’s only hope is to find their creator – a magician who has been lost for centuries.

What they find will change not just their own lives, but the fate of the world, for ever …

An ode to the world of NARNIA, THE LOST MAGICIAN is a classic in the making from one of the UK’s most talented children’s authors. 

~*~

For generations, stories like The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis have captured the imagination of children and adults alike. In the decades since, we have had Philip Pullman’sHis Dark Materials trilogy, J.K. Rowling’sHarry Potter series and The Inkworld books by Cornelia Funke. Many authors are indebted to early fairy tale traditions and the golden age of Children’s Literature of the mid nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, and indeed, Narnia and C.S. Lewis. And here, in The Lost Magician, we have a tribute to reading, readers and those other worlds that so many of us spent our childhoods exploring long into the night, beyond our bedtimes because finding out what happened next simply could not wait.

As a child, it was the above books and many others that formed me and that I was drawn to. The stories where the heroes went on adventures, or where the characters got caught up in things they could never even imagine, like the Pevensie children and like Meggie. So what would happen when the elements of a door to a new world (Narnia), living stories (Inkheart), the requisite siblings and the backdrop of war or the end of war were combined with a secret mission, present in some of the most well-known spy stories? Well, that’s where The Lost Magician comes in, marrying all these elements into the start of a new series revolving around the world of Folio, where stories new and old live.

In the first book, they are divided into three factions: The Reads, The Unreads and The Never Reads when the four Hastings siblings are sent to Barfield after the war while their parents search for a new home in London after theirs is destroyed. Simon, Patricia, Evelyn and Larry – aged between eight and fourteen – find themselves in a strange house for the summer, with an unusual attic library that takes them into a new world, where they find out that the stories they know well are under attack from the army of the Never Reads, led by Jana, a woman made of glass and her robotic army, who seek to purge the world of stories and only allow facts to live.

Much like Narnia, it is a quest-story, where the main characters have to save world at war, after living through a war in their own world and carrying their own scars. Whilst some elements mirror those from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, there are many differences that make this its own story in its own right. The elements of a future yet to come that Evie is taken with when she first arrives will threaten what she knows and loves – and she will question why the world has to have one or the other – and the siblings must also search for a lost magician, missing for centuries. Will they find him? Or will his story be woven into future books?

I loved this book, and will be keen to revisit it at some stage, and look forward to future books in the series, to see where this goes, and the differences it will have to its predecessors. What else will the world of Folio offer us?