Beyond the Deepwoods (The Edge Chronicles: 1): No.1 - Softcover

Here is a tale of fantastic lands at the edge of the world, where certain rocks float in the air and the feared Deepwoods are crowded with extraordinary trees and creatures. Paul Stewart tells the story with considerable input from Chris Riddell's copious and wonderfully detailed line drawings of fabulous creatures, often reminiscent of Tenniel's or Mervyn Peake's grotesques. Overall the narrative has a familiar shape, as the young lad Twig who's been raised by woodtrolls learns that his destiny lies elsewhere, and blunders off through the Deepwoods to find teeming horrors, unexpected friends, comic menaces, enslavement as a pet, his true parentage, and the nature of his feared nemesis the Gloamglozer. It's all told with joyously inventive relish, and the cavalcade of life never slows: sky pirates, smelly halitoads, hover worms, slaughterers, hammelhorns, caterbirds, skullpelts, bloodoaks, gyle goblins and their Grossmother, spindlebugs, milchgrubs, banderbears, wig-wigs resembling carnivorous tribbles, the very disgusting rotsucker, and more--each illustrated in loving detail. Though generally reviewed as a novel for children (like Stewart's previous books), Beyond the Deepwoods is more grown-up than many a routine "adult" fantasy series, and has the kind of compulsive readability that makes Harry Potter a treat for older readers too. Twig's saga, "The Edge Chronicles", continues in Stormchaser. -- David Langford

"In the Tolkien/Pratchett tradition, fabulously illustrated and written with more than usual elegance." --"The Sunday Times" "A richly inventive fantasy" --"Literary Review" " In the Tolkien/Pratchett tradition, fabulously illustrated and written with more than usual elegance." -- "The Sunday Times" " A richly inventive fantasy" -- "Literary Review"