The Magician's Nephew (2000)
The Magician's Nephew is a 2000 fantasy book written by C. S. Lewis.
Digory Kirke has come to live in a gloomy London house with an uncle nobody quite trusts. Next door, a girl named Polly is exploring the attics when the two of them stumble into Uncle Andrew's hidden study and his box of bright yellow rings. One touch, and the world falls away. The rings carry the children to a still wood dotted with pools, each a doorway to somewhere else, and then onward to a place at the very beginning of things. C. S. Lewis wrote this Narnia tale late but set it first, the story of how the whole wardrobe world came to be.
Quick answers
What is The Magician's Nephew about?
Digory Kirke has come to live in a gloomy London house with an uncle nobody quite trusts. Next door, a girl named Polly is exploring the attics when the two of them stumble into Uncle Andrew's hidden study and his box of bright yellow rings. One touch, and the world falls away. The rings carry the children to a still wood dotted with pools, each a doorway to somewhere else, and then onward to a place at the very beginning of things. C. S. Lewis wrote this Narnia tale late but set it first, the story of how the whole wardrobe world came to be.
When was The Magician's Nephew published?
The Magician's Nephew was published on 2 October 2000.
Who made The Magician's Nephew?
The Magician's Nephew was written by C. S. Lewis.
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A few thoughts on The Magician's Nephew
The wood between the worlds, a ring of still pools each opening on a different sky, is the kind of threshold Coraline crosses in Henry Selick's film, where an ordinary door hides an uncanny elsewhere. Both stories trust a child to step through and face what waits, and both make the crossing itself feel dangerous.
Dark doorways and curious children
The Magician's Nephew sends Digory and Polly between worlds with a pair of rings and no adult worth trusting. That mix of wonder and menace runs through Coraline's button-eyed other mother, the moon-fed magic of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, the wish shop of xxxHolic, and Made in Abyss's beautiful, hungry pit.
Family fantasy classics beyond the wardrobe
The Magician's Nephew is the Narnia book made for reading aloud, all creation songs and talking beasts. Keep the same shelf going with Charlotte's Web's barnyard grace, Redwall's abbey feasts and siege maps, Shrek's fairy-tale mischief, and the first Harry Potter film's candlelit Great Hall.
Witch-queens and empires at stake
Jadis arrives in The Magician's Nephew having already destroyed one world, the genre's great villainess awake before Narnia draws breath. For more thrones held by terrifying women, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon run on them, Elden Ring buries its queen at the heart of everything, and The Witcher 3 hunts theirs across a war-torn continent.