The Murdstone Trilogy

Wellfair dependency

Release Date: OUT NOW!

320 pages | Hardback Author: Mal Peet Publisher: David Fickling Books

The Murdstone Trilogy is an oddity. It’s not a trilogy. Although it is a three- part story about one. Nor is it strictly a fantasy. Although again, it is about one. In part, the book tells an epic, Tolkienesque story about a battle between good and evil. But it’s also a black comedy about a man who writes a bestselling novel inspired by an interdimensional reality.

That man is Philip Murdstone, a writer whose career is on the slide. Nobody wants to read his awardwinning stories about the pain of childhood, and when his agent suggests that he write a fantasy epic, Murdstone abhors the idea. But after drunkenly stumbling into an old stone circle, he’s visited by an otherworldly dwarf who spins an extraordinary tale of necromancers, battle- hungry Swelts and magic swords. It’s a story that will make Philip Murdstone – and quite possibly break him.

Mal Peet delights in playing with language, and his two main characters – the increasingly unhinged Murdstone and fantastical muse Pocket Wellfair – are expertly drawn. The chapters where the two argue are some of the most entertaining. The fantasy story is secondary. Instead, we follow Murdstone’s rise as a novelist and his fall as he struggles to convince Wellfair to help him write a sequel. A refreshing and absorbing change of pace.

Like Murdstone, Peet is an award- winning children’s author, and he’s won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize.