COVER REVEAL! HIDDENSEE: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker by Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire, best known for WICKED: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which was turned into the best-selling Broadway musical Wicked, has struck gold again.

Maguire has made a career out of fractured fairy tales, spinning new versions of tales from Lewis Carroll to Hans Christian Andersen to Charles Dickens.

This coming fall, he has his eyes set on E.T.A. Hoffman's THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING, which was adapted by Alexandre Dumas and popularized bycomposer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in his now-iconic ballet.

The cover and summary were just revealed, and Broadway World is on the scene to give you an inside look at this hot fall release!

Ready for a summary??

In this imaginative novel rooted in the rich soil of early-nineteenth-century German Romanticism, beloved New York Times bestselling author Gregory Maguire twins an origin legend of the famous Nutcracker with the life of Drosselmeier, the toymaker who carves him

Gregory Maguire's novels have been called "bewitching," "remarkable," "extraordinary," "engrossing," "amazing," and "delicious." Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in Wicked, Wonderland in After Alice and Dickensian London in Lost, Maguire now takes us to the Black Forest of Bavaria and Munich of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffman. Hiddensee recreates the backstory of the Nutcracker, reimaging how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how it magically guided an ailing little girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a snowy Christmas Eve. It also brings to life the mysterious godfather Drosselmeier-the ominous, canny, one-eyed toymaker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky's ballet-who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter.

But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism a migrating strain of a Hellenic mystery-cult, and ponders a profound question: how a person who is abused by life, short-changed and challenged, can access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless. Ultimately, Hiddensee, offers a message of hope. If the compromised Godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized on the eve of a winter holiday, has something precious to share.

HIDDENSEE by Gregory Maguire releases from HarperCollins on October 31, 2017.

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