Impossible Creatures

There's a place where all the wildest stories began . From Katherine Rundell, the British Book Awards Author of the Year, comes the paperback release of the first novel in the critically acclaimed, award winning, best-selling Impossible Creatures series. This edition includes The Centaur's Spectacles bonus short story.

Christopher is stunned when he discovers a passage to the Archipelago: a cluster of magical islands where all the creatures of myth still live and breed and thrive in their thousands. There he meets Mal: a girl from the islands, who is in possession of a flying coat and a baby griffin, and who is being pursued by a killer. Together they embark on an urgent quest to discover why the creatures are suddenly perishing, voyaging across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, in a bid to save both the islands and the world beyond them from a rising evil - before it's too late.

Review

There was Tolkien, there is Pullman and now there is Katherine Rundell. Wondrous invention, marvellous writing. This book is her best yet, and that's saying something. Just riveting, quite extraordinary. ― Michael Morpurgo

A marvellous imaginative fantasy told with great style and sparkle - a book to race through in a day and keep for a lifetime. ― Jacqueline Wilson

Katherine Rundell is a prodigiously gifted storyteller and IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES is wildly good. Spectacularly inventive, it is both a thrilling and page-turning epic and a clarion call to young readers to use the special gifts of childhood- love, courage, imagination and open-heartedness - to fight to save precious creatures of all kinds before they vanish before our eyes. My Book of the Year. ― Lauren St. John

Fantastically exuberant, wildly imaginative, impossibly brilliant. Rundell's best, which is something to be marvelled at. It made me want to yell, or laugh, or bite something. ― Kiran Millwood Hargrave

A rare and remarkable feat of glittering imagination from a truly masterful storyteller. ― Catherine Doyle

A fierce, fantastic, wild-hearted adventure that roars and bristles with imagination. I devoured it like a hungry dragon ― Sam Sedgman

One of our most talented writers for children ― Observer

A menagerie of delights. So packed with magic you'll want to take notes. Impossible Creatures is a world you'll want to move into. ― Patrick Ness

Between the covers of Impossible Creatures is a world as enchanting, as perilous, as richly imagined as Narnia or Middle Earth. ― Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Flickers with a rare and fierce beauty - unputdownable. ― Abi Elphinstone

About the Author

Katherine Rundell is a multi-million-bestselling author whose novels for children have won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children's Book Award, among many others. Impossible Creatures was Waterstones Book of the Year 2023, and in 2024 Katherine was named the British Book Awards Author of the Year and Impossible Creatures won the Children's Fiction Book of the Year. She is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College and a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, where she works on Renaissance literature. Her books for adults include Super-Infinite, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize. Very occasionally she goes climbing across the rooftops of Oxford, late at night.