‘Phantastes’ is a modern retelling of George MacDonald’s classic 1858 fantasy novel. It preserves the story line and themes of the original while improving the accessibility and readability of this seminal work in the history of fantasy. An appendix on the life of MacDonald and another on the literary structure of ‘Phantastes’ are included.

Praise for MacDonald’s original 1858 publication:

Whatever book you are reading now, you simply must get this at once. - C.S. Lewis to a friend after his discovery of MacDonald’s Phantastes.

George MacDonald is the grandfather of us all - all of us who struggle to come to terms with truth through fantasy. - Madeleine L'Engle

George MacDonald is pre-eminently a mythopoeic writer. … In his power to project his inner life into images, beings, landscapes which are valid for all, he is one of the more remarkable writers of the nineteenth century. - W.H. Auden

Phantastes is a haunting, provocative and disquieting novel that links the dreams of medieval romance with the new awakenings of the Victorian era and - in opening a long-lost door to the realm of Faerie - stands as a daringly challenging forerunner to the modern fantasy novel. - Brian Sibley, author of C.S. Lewis through the Shadowlands

George MacDonald did indeed realise the apparent paradox of a St. Francis of Aberdeen, seeing the same sort of halo round every flower and bird…. It is a certain special sense of significance, which the tradition that most values it calls sacramental. - G.K. Chesterton

It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought - almost unwillingly …- the Everyman edition of Phantastes. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a threshold. … What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise my imagination. - C.S. Lewis