This extraordinary edition of Phantastes contains

• The complete, unabridged text from the 1858 edition

• 33 illustrations by Arthur Hughes from the 1905 edition

• Foreword by poet Malcolm Guite, President of the George MacDonald Society

• A 51-page Critical Introduction by MacDonald scholar Dr. Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson

• Appendix by Dr. Gregorio Montejo

• George MacDonald's essay, "The Fantastic Imagination"

In 1916 the young C.S. Lewis bought a novel while browsing through the bookstall at a train station in Surrey, England. Not long after, he wrote to his best friend: “I have had a great literary experience this week… whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once.” Looking back years later, Lewis wrote “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized... I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.”

“In dreams of unspeakable joy—of restored friendships; of revived embraces; of love which said it had never died; of faces that had vanished long ago, yet said with smiling lips that they knew nothing of the grave; of pardons implored, and granted with such bursting floods of love, that I was almost glad I had sinned—thus I passed through this wondrous twilight.”
Phantastes, Chapter XVIII

“George MacDonald is the grandfather of us all—all of us who write fantasy.”
Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time

George MacDonald, Scottish poet, novelist, and minister, was a mentor to Lewis Carroll, friend of Mark Twain, and inspiration to countless readers including C. S. Lewis, who wrote “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.”