Impossible Creatures: Exclusive Edition (Paperback)

The Waterstones Book of the Year Winner 2023

Waterstones Children's Book of the Month for September 2024

Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Children's Fiction Book of the Year 2024

Exclusive Edition - A Standard Edition is also available

Exclusive editions with four creatures to collect – Unicorn, Griffin, Kanko and Jaculus Dragon. Extra content bespoke to each edition written by Katherine Rundell. The creature you receive will be chosen at random. Also features the short story from the Archipelago, ‘The Centaur’s Spectacles’ (first published in the Waterstones Exclusive Hardback edition).

'It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.'

A boy called Christopher is visiting his reclusive grandfather when he witnesses an avalanche of mythic creatures come tearing down the hill. This is how Christopher learns that his grandfather is the guardian of one of the ways between the non-magical world and a place called the Archipelago: a cluster of magical islands, where all the creatures we tell of in myth live and breed and thrive alongside humans. They have been protected for thousands of years from being discovered; now, terrifyingly, the protection has worn thin, and creatures are breaking through.

Then a girl, Mal, appears in Christopher’s world. She is in possession of a flying coat, is being pursued by a killer, and is herself in pursuit of a baby griffin. Mal, Christopher and the griffin embark on an urgent quest across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, to find the truth – with unimaginable consequences for both their worlds. Together the two must face the problem of power, and of knowledge, and of what love demands of us.