Heartless

The origins of Neverland are revealed in this enchanting Peter Pan prequel from Parry (The Magician’s Daughter). James Hook is seven when his mother dies and he’s sent to live in a workhouse in Victorian London. It’s there that he meets Peter, 10, who loves the stories James tells in the dark after everyone else has gone to bed. James runs out of old stories eventually, so he begins to make up new ones about a place called Neverland. There, Peter is the child-king of the island and James is a pirate. The more the boys imagine this land the realer it becomes to them until one horrible night when Peter successfully flies away to Neverland. Though James tries to follow him by jumping off the roof, instead of soaring as Peter did, he crashes to the ground. Afterward, he embarks on an obsessive, lifelong search for Neverland, magic, and the cruel childhood friend who left him behind. Parry brings James’s increasingly desperate quest to life through vivid prose and probes deeply into what it actually means never to grow up. Readers won’t need to be devotees of the original to find enjoyment here. Agent: Hannah Bowman, Liza Dawson Assoc. (Jan.)