The Magician's Nephew
core novel 1955 The Chronicles of Narnia
Record
| First published | 1955 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.06 (628,638 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 221 |
| First-edition ISBN | 0064405052 |
| First-edition publisher | The Bodley Head |
| First-edition country | UK |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
A prequel to the rest of the Narnia series, the story opens in London in the summer of 1900, where two children, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, become friends after discovering a passage between their neighboring houses leads into the attic study of Digory's Uncle Andrew, an amateur magician. Andrew tricks Polly into touching one of his experimental rings, causing her to vanish, then blackmails Digory into using a second ring to follow and bring her back. The rings carry them not home but into the Wood between the Worlds, a quiet place dotted with pools that each lead to a different universe. Exploring one pool, the children reach the dying city of Charn and unwittingly wake Jadis, a powerful and ruthless queen who once destroyed all life in her own world.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Chronicles of Narnia
- Series: The Chronicles of Narnia core; position 6 of 7 in the series' recorded order
- Author: C.S. Lewis
Notes
- From the series record (The Chronicles of Narnia): Dual ordering: publication (1950-56) vs internal chronology (HarperCollins renumbering, 1994); scholars generally prefer publication order.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Chronicles of Narnia: position 6 of 7: previous The Horse and His Boy (1954) · next The Last Battle (1956)
- Internal chronology, within The Chronicles of Narnia: position 1 of 7: next The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician%27s_Nephew
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