The Magician’s Nephew
C.S. Lewis, 1955
Fantasy Young adultLiterary fictionContemporary fiction
A boy and a girl stumble into a wood between worlds, where a wrong bell wakes an ancient evil and a lion begins to sing.
Feels like wonder, grief and curiosity. About love, death and war.
A page from the book
What a child asks for when there is nothing left to bargain with.
Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.‘My son, my son,’ said Aslan. ‘I know. Grief is great. C.S. Lewis.Lewis wrote this prequel late in the series; it explains the lamp-post and the wardrobe’s origin.
Books that feel like this
More by C.S. Lewis
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis, 1950
Four children walk through the back of a wardrobe into a country locked in endless winter, where the animals talk and a lion is expected.
The Horse and His Boy
C.S. Lewis, 1954
A boy and a talking horse flee slavery in the south and ride north through desert cities and mountain passes, toward a lion they cannot outrun.
The Silver Chair
C.S. Lewis, 1953
Two children descend into an underground kingdom to rescue a prince, armed with four signs and very little courage.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Magician’s Nephew like?
- Feels like wonder, grief and curiosity. About love, death and war.
- What should I read after The Magician’s Nephew?
- If you liked The Magician’s Nephew, try The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern), Northern Lights (Philip Pullman) and A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle).
A taste of the feed
The strangest letter a magician receives is pinned to a five-year-old.
The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.
The Night Circus · Erin Morgenstern
A gift that looks like a compass but measures something else entirely.
It lay heavily in her hands, the crystal face gleaming, the golden body exquisitely machined. It was very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures, each of them painted with extraordinary precision, as if on ivory with the finest and slenderest sable brush. She turned the dial around to look at them all. There was an anchor; an hourglass surmounted by a skull; a chameleon, a bull, a beehive... Thirty-six altogether, and she couldn’t even guess what they meant.
Northern Lights · Philip Pullman
The moment a familiar body becomes something no myth has a name for.
The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen.
A Wrinkle in Time · Madeleine L'Engle
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