Book overview
Wonderland was only the beginning.
"An incredibly fresh and imaginative page-turner... Terence Sullivan is a brilliant storyteller." - Ellen Baker, author of The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson
London, 1913.
Eighteen-year-old Alice Liddell is confined to Pastoria House, undergoing treatments meant to cure her of Wonderland - visions her doctors insist are delusions. But Pastoria House is no ordinary institution. It is a hidden haven for young witches, and none of them is more closely guarded than Alice. The enigmatic headmistress, Miss Molloy, has bound Alice's powers to keep her from the truth: her dreams are not madness. They are prophecy.
When Alice meets Wendolyn Darling - another dreamer, bound to her by a connection neither girl can explain - the walls of her small, managed life begin to shift. Wendy speaks of a boy named Peter and an island that cannot be found, with a certainty Alice envies. Then Wendy vanishes. Cornered by three malevolent witches, Alice flees the only way left to her: through a mirror, into the world her dreams had always warned her about.
Oz.
Hunted for powers she doesn't yet understand, Alice is pursued across the realm by Princess Languidere, who collects the heads of beautiful women and inherits their dreams; the exiled witch Mombi; the clawed gnome legions that rise from the wells at night; and the fallen demigod Lord Roquat, waiting beneath his crystal palace. Her only hope lies with an unlikely fellowship - a shape-shifting prince named Blinkem, whose loyalty deepens into something neither of them planned; an ingenious inventor and his mechanical soldier; a spunky Munchkin girl; and a wild dragon Alice names Dinah.
Together they journey to find Tattypoo, the Great Witch of the North - the one being in Oz who holds the key to Alice's past. But some secrets were hidden for a reason. And what Alice learns will unmake everything she believes about who she is, where she comes from, and what she was born to do.
A gothic portal fantasy of time-bent identity, maternal magic, and a stolen legacy - where the worlds of Oz, Wonderland, and Neverland were always one story, and it was never finished.
Book One of the Oz Multiverse.
Content notes: on-page violence and gore, beheading and body horror, sexual menace and coercion including an on-page assault, confinement and psychiatric control. Closed-door, slow-burn romance. Adult dark fantasy.