Abarat: Days of Magic Nights of War

Barker, Clive

ISBN 10: 0060735899 ISBN 13: 9780060735890

Publisher: Harperfestival, 2004

Synopsis

Candy Quackenbush's adventures in the amazing world of the Abarat are getting more strange by the hour. Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight, has sent his henchman to capture her. "Why?" she wonders. What would Carrion want with a girl from Minnesota? And why is Candy beginning to feel that the world of Abarat is familiar to her? Why can she speak words of magic she doesn't even remember learning?

There is a mystery here. And Carrion, along with his fiendish grandmother, Mater Motley, suspects that whatever Candy is, she could spoil their plans to take control of the Abarat.

Now Candy's companions must race against time to save her from the clutches of Carrion, and she must solve the mystery of her past before the forces of Night and Day clash and Absolute Midnight descends upon the islands.

A final war is about to begin. And Candy is going to need to make some choices that will change her life forever ...

Performed by Richard Ferrone

About this title

Review:

Clive Barker's inventiveness reaches new heights in Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War. What might have been just another portal fantasy in which a girl from our mundane world becomes crucial to the affairs of a fantastic one next door becomes something rich and strange because of the book's strong visual imagery. Barker spent many months painting at random and then used those paintings to create, and illustrate, the world of Abarat, where each island of an archipelago lives in the perpetual light or darkness of a single eternal day.

Abarat is a world of the monstrous, the bizarre and the beautiful--this is the book which most totally embodies Barker's strange talent since the short stories of The Books of Blood. There is power and suspense to this book's buildup to a final confrontation between the monstrous, treacherous and pathetic Christopher Carrion and the ingénue Cindy Quackenbush, but in a sense its point is all the decorations along the way; this second volume of Barker's quartet delivers on the promises of the first.--Roz Kaveney

Review:

Praise for Abarat:

‘Abarat is more than just a new and major contender. It is (like his earlier book, The Thief of Always) full of a level of beautiful terror that children are still just able to bear.’ Independent

‘Always creating and always pushing into the furthest reaches of the human mind, he is an artist in every sense of the word. He is the great imaginer of our time.’ Quentin Tarantino

‘Abarat is a sumptuous and lovely thing.’
Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: Harperfestival
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0060735899
• ISBN 13: 9780060735890
• Binding: Audio CD