Fire and Hemlock
core novel 1985 Fire and Hemlock
Record
| First published | 1985 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.95 (11,271 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 420 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780688039424 |
Synopsis
Fire and Hemlock follows Polly Whittacker, a young woman who slowly realizes she carries two distinct, conflicting sets of memories of her own life, one of which centers on a mysterious older man named Thomas Lynn whom she first met as a child at a funeral she was not supposed to attend. As Polly pieces together the two versions of her past, she reconstructs years of an unusual friendship with Tom built around collaborative storytelling, in which the stories the two of them invented together seemed to bleed into reality in ways neither fully acknowledged. Sensing that Tom is caught in some kind of ongoing supernatural danger tied to their old games, Polly must work out what is real, what she has forgotten, and what she can still do to help him.
Where it sits
- Universe: Fire and Hemlock
- Series: Fire and Hemlock (novel) core; position 1 of 1 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Diana Wynne Jones
Awards (verified)
- Phoenix Award (Best Book), 2005: honor; Confirmed directly via the Children's Literature Association's own Phoenix Award page: an Honor Book for 2005 (the 2005 winner was The Catalogue of the Universe by Margaret Mahy). The Phoenix Award honors an English-language children's book published 20 years earlier that did not win a major literary award at the time -- 2005 = books from 1985, matching Fire and Hemlock's UK first-edition year. Registered as `honor`, this project's exact enum value for this case.
Notes
- From the series record (Fire and Hemlock (novel)): A contemporary-set fantasy novel reworking the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. Registered under its 1985 UK first edition year per this project's author-credit/textual-integrity convention (a 1984 US edition also exists; UK first per Wikipedia). Standalone; registered as a single-work universe (LOTR-analogy convention). Confirmed separate continuity from Diana Wynne Jones's other admitted universes: Howl's Moving Castle, Chrestomanci, and the Dalemark Quartet.
Sources
← Fire and Hemlock dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.