In the Night Garden
core novel 2006 The Orphan's Tales
Record
| First published | 2006 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.03 (9,285 ratings, collected 2026-10-28) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780553384031 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
A girl lives alone in the garden of a sultan's palace, shunned by everyone because her eyelids are so densely inked with words that people take her for a demon. One night a young prince slips away to find her, and she begins to tell him the stories written around her eyes. Each tale opens into another: shape-shifting witches and wild horse-women, heron kings and beast princesses, snake gods, dog monks and living stars, every story stranger than the last and all of them secretly connected. As the prince returns night after night, his angry elder sister Dinarzad grows suspicious, and the story of the storyteller herself begins to emerge.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Orphan's Tales
- Series: The Orphan's Tales core; position 1 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Awards (verified)
- James Tiptree Jr. Award, 2006: won
- World Fantasy Award (Best Novel), 2007: finalist
Notes
- From the series record (The Orphan's Tales): Two volumes of nested tales told by an orphan girl in a sultan's garden.
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 The Orphan's Tales: position 1 of 2: next In the Cities of Coin and Spice (2007)
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Orphan's Tales
- Reader ratings: mythpunk shelf listing
- Library catalogue record: In the Night Garden (Bantam Spectra, 2006)
- Library catalogue record: In the Night Garden
- The Book Smugglers: review of In the Night Garden
- ISBN-13 form of the recorded ISBN-10 0553378465 (same edition)
- sfadb: Catherynne M. Valente
- Fancyclopedia: Catherynne M. Valente
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