THE MURDSTONE TRILOGY by Mal Peet
The Murdstone Trilogy takes a mocking swipe at writers still churning out sub-Tolkienesque fantasies, full of high-sounding phrases but ultimately going nowhere.
Philip Murdstone is the story’s despairing novelist previously specialising in “sensitive” stories about problem children that no-one wanted to read. Led on by his rapacious agent, he finally tries his hand at fantasy writing but only succeeds after somehow conjuring up a thoroughly nasty dwarfish figure from the past.
He is named Pocket Wellfair, an inventively foul-mouthed character who writes most of Philip’s story for him but through malign reasons of his own. Literary and personal disaster soon loom. Read it whatever your age and find yourself laughing pretty well at every page – it really is that good.”
‘A deliriously freewheeling send-up of the publishing industry and the current sword-and-sorcery craze results. But there’s a vein of real feeling. “The world is the stories we tell of it,” one of the fantasy beings says to Philip. They should all be as lively and entertaining as this one.’ ~ The Wall Street Journal
‘In this rollicking black comedy, Mal Peet does not just have his cake and eat it: he scoffs the entire patisserie.’ ~ Daily Mail
Mal Peet (1947-2015) is the acclaimed author of the Carnegie Medal-winning novel Tamar as well as the Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book Life: An Exploded Diagram and three Paul Faustino novels: Keeper, The Penalty, and Exposure, a winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. He is also the co-author of Cloud Tea Monkeys, Mysterious Traveler, and Night Sky Dragons, all of which he wrote with his wife, Elspeth Graham.
