Fairy Tale

From legendary storyteller Stephen King, comes this No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller, now with a stunning new cover look for Summer 2024.

WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE OF HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student.

But when Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. When Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe – inside the shed is a portal to another world.

Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher – for their world or ours.

About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than 70 books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His crime thrillers featuring Holly Gibney include Mr Mercedes, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel, and The Outsider, both of which were adapted into successful TV series, as well as Finders Keepers, End of Watch and the title story from If It Bleeds. Many of his titles are the basis for major motion pictures including It, Stand by Me (adapted from The Body) and The Shawshank Redemption, which is IMDb's top-rated movie of all time. He lives in Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

Reviews

"I read (in one long, long sitting) Stephen King's fabulous Fairy Tale and it was just such a trip! A trip to a magical, terrifying land where wonders and horrors are one. But also a trip back home – to that prose that lulled me into nightmares in my teens. The voice of the King" —Guillermo del Toro

"Stephen King has all the daring, enchantment and even romance of a classic bedtime story, but King's signature unsettling style will keep you sitting up straight and wide-eyed rather than drifting off to dreamland" ―Vanity Fair

"Fairy Tale is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees... allusions and homages abound... a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action" ―New York Times Book Review

"Fairy Tale is vintage, timeless King, a transporting, terrifying treat born from multiple lockdowns which, in true King style, puts its finger right on that tender point which is the threshold between childhood and growing up" ―Guardian

"A fantasy gem... King tells this wonderfully fantastical tale with such effortless skill that the reader cannot help but fully invest in Charlie and all the characters, his evocation of late 20th-century small-town USA and its people pitch perfect, and his descriptions of the parallel world of Empis... vividly terrifying" ―Irish Independent

Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.18 x 19.81 cm