Knopf Books for Young Readers has announced the expansion of British author Katherine Rundell’s middle grade fantasy juggernaut, Impossible Creatures, from a trilogy to a five-book series. Nancy Siscoe, senior executive editor at Knopf and Rundell’s U.S. editor, acquired North American rights to two additional books from Pete Knapp at Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management, who negotiated the deal on behalf of Claire Wilson at RCW Literary Agency.
The series debuted in September 2023 to great fanfare in the U.K., where it was a Sunday Times bestseller, a Children’s Book of the Week in the Times, the Independent, and the Daily Telegraph, and the winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year award. Knopf released Impossible Creatures in the U.S. in September 2024; it has remained on the New York Times bestseller list since debuting at #1, and was named Barnes & Noble’s Children’s Book of the Year.
Book two, The Poisoned King, is scheduled for global release on September 11 with a 750,000-copy first printing in North America. It will be available in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats, with exclusive editions from Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart in the U.S., Indigo in Canada, and Waterstones and Indies in the U.K. Launch events will be held at bookstores and libraries worldwide in the fall.
Impossible Creatures has earned comparisons to some of Rundell’s own literary heroes: Ursula K. Le Guin, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others. But it was an unfinished epic poem by 17th-century poet John Donne (the subject of her biography for adults, Super-Infinite), titled “Metempsychosis”—about the transmigration of a soul, reincarnated in various forms across the centuries—that sparked the concept for her series.
The new book picks up when hero Christopher Forrester is summoned back to the Archipelago, a secret island chain where fantastical beings are in danger of extinction. Rundell said in a statement, “I hope to make the Archipelago a place large enough to fit every child’s imagination; a world they long to return to. I want there to be jokes, and the burning warmth of friendship and care, and real thrilling peril; I think when you put a child character in peril, you honor their capacity to rise to it, and you honor the child reader alongside. These are hard times we live in; I would love the books to be a place children can go to rejoice, a place they can go to explore and fly. Across the series there will be many more mythical creatures for kids to love and loathe and cherish. I have the ending of book five clear in my mind; I am so thrilled to have the opportunity to take children there.”
The paperback of book one, Impossible Creatures, will be available in the U.S. and Canada on August 26 with a first printing of 500,000 copies. Exclusive editions will be available from Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart, and Indigo, each featuring stained edges depicting a different magical creature. The paperbacks will also include a bonus short story about a pair of magical spectacles from the Archipelago that have found their way into our world.
Siscoe said in a statement, “It is a privilege to be on this journey with the remarkable Katherine Rundell. Her books are so packed with adventure, danger, love, discovery, loss, and wild joy that reading them is like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart: they make you feel alive and hopeful and ready to face whatever challenges might await. I suspect it is this quality that makes adult readers love them as much as children do.”
