The Magician's Elephant [Hardcover]

A New York Times bestseller!

Kate DiCamillo conjures a haunting fable about trusting the unexpected and making the extraordinary come true.

What if? Why not? Could it be?

When a fortuneteller's tent appears in the market square of the city of Baltese, orphan Peter Augustus Duchene knows the questions that he needs to ask: Does his sister still live? And if so, how can he find her? The fortuneteller's mysterious answer (an elephant! An elephant will lead him there!) sets off a chain of events so remarkable, so impossible, that you will hardly dare to believe it’s true. With atmospheric illustrations by fine artist Yoko Tanaka, here is a dreamlike and captivating tale that could only be narrated by Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo. In this timeless fable, she evokes the largest of themes — hope and belonging, desire and compassion — with the lightness of a magician’s touch.Kate DiCamillo has a gift, inequitably distributed among writers of all kinds, of eliminating the obvious and still egging on the reader. She writes beautifully but thinks simply. The purity of her prose – the reader goes from paragraph to paragraph delighting in the wonderful simple sentences – only adds to the winsome purity of her vision.
—New York Times Book Review

DiCamillo’s carefully crafted prose creates an evocative aura of timelessness for a story that is, in fact, timeless. Tanaka’s acrylic artwork is meticulous in detail and aptly matches the tone of the narrative.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

Reading like a fable told long ago, with rich language that begs to be read aloud, this is a magical story about hope and love, loss and home, and of questioning the world versus accepting it as it is.&llÓC