A Swiftly Tilting Planet
core novel 1978 Time Quintet
Record
| First published | 1978 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.07 (112,811 ratings, collected 2026-09-05) |
| Page count | 278 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780374373627 |
| Internal chronology | 3 |
Synopsis
The story opens on Thanksgiving evening, ten years after the events of the previous book, as Meg Murry, now married to Calvin O'Keefe and expecting their first child, gathers with her family when news arrives of an impending nuclear war threatened by a dictator known as "Mad Dog" Branzillo. With Calvin away at a scientific conference, it falls to Meg's young brother Charles Wallace to act, urged on by Calvin's estranged mother, Mrs. O'Keefe, who hands him an old family charm called Patrick's Rune, a rhyming prayer of protection passed down from her Irish grandmother. First published in 1978, A Swiftly Tilting Planet belongs to the Time Quintet series.
Where it sits
- Universe: Time Quintet
- Series: Time Quintet core; position 3 of 5 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Madeleine L'Engle
Notes
- From the series record (Time Quintet): The five-book Time Quintet: A Wrinkle in Time and its direct sequels, following the Murry and O'Keefe children across cosmic/time travel adventures. This project treats the whole quintet as Core Canon; L'Engle's separately-continuitied O'Keefe family novels (e.g. The Arm of the Starfish, Dragons in the Waters), which share some characters but are spy/thriller fiction rather than fantasy, are out of scope and not catalogued here.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Time Quintet: position 3 of 5: previous A Wind in the Door (1973) · next Many Waters (1986)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Quintet
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Swiftly_Tilting_Planet
- PaperBackSwap (Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition records)
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Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.