A classic story of magic, mystery, and adventure in a fairy-tale world.

Princess Irene’s great-great-grandmother has a testing task for Curdie. Curdie will not go alone though; she provides him with a companion, the oddest and ugliest creature Curdie has ever seen, but one who turns out to be the most loyal friend he could have hoped for.

In the years since The Princess and the Goblin Curdie has grown and started to hunt. He's begun to doubt the story of Irene's great-great grandmother, but when he meets her himself he is given a quest and a gift. When he touches anything, man or beast, he can detect what they are like on the inside. Sent on a quest with a friendly beast, Lina, for company, Curdie once again finds himself in the service of the King and the Princess.

George Macdonald (1824-1905) was born at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where his father was a miller and his family Congregationalists. As a young man he was ordained a minister of the Congregational church but he resigned after a disagreement with his deacons over doctrine, and from 1853 he earned his living by lecturing and writing, often in poor health, which meant periodic travelling in search of purer air for his lungs. In 1851 he married Louisa Powell, with whom he spent a long and happy life, sadly ending in grief when three of his thirteen children died of tuberculosis and he suffered a stroke that deprived him of speech for his last five years.

He was a prolific writer, yet it is his fantasies for children that have survived. The Princess and the Goblin was the second of these, published first as a serial in Good Words for the Young, a periodical of which he became editor for a short time in 1869. About a hundred years later W.H. Auden wrote, 'To me, George MacDonald's most extraordinary, and precious, gift is his ability, in all his stories, to create an atmosphere of goodness about which there is nothing phone or moralistic. Nothing is rarer in literature.

Target Age: 10 and up

Penguin Young Readers Group

Pub Date: August 01, 1996

ISBN: 9780140367621

0.7" H x 7.8" L x 5.0" W

272 pages

paperback

The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald (Puffin Classics)