A witch’s curse ensures that a boy can never wake at night nor sleep when the sun beams. Conversely, a girl is doomed never to slumber at night nor be awake during daylight hours. Finally, a twist of fate unites them. MacDonald’s skill in imagery and grandfatherly style deliver a remarkable story that is accessible and light, yet acutely stirring and imbued with enduring value. Your capacity for imagination is sure to grow through this story that lifts our spirits and fills our minds with joy.

Join the children Tangle and Mossy as they embark on a journey of faith, spiritual maturity, and sanctification. Richly imaginative and sparkling with mythic qualities, this story communicates the joy of entering into faith as a child, traveling through life with a loving companion, and longing for the heavenly country. Poignant and beautifully written, The Golden Key will nourish both faith and imagination in the listener. C.S. Lewis delighted in the cleansing ability of reading George MacDonald, and The Golden Key certainly possesses that quality.

The Light Princess is a short story that is warm and humorous, with a surprisingly poignant conclusion. A princess doomed by a witch to lose her “gravity” results in a silly heroine that has neither physical nor spiritual weight. George MacDonald’s masterful teaching on the subject of sacrificial love is delivered eloquently in the events and characters of this engaging story.

George MacDonald was the great nineteenth-century innovator of modern fantasy, who influenced the work of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. This book collects some of his finest fairy stories, including “The Gray Wolf,” “The Cruel Painter,” “The Broken Swords,” “The Wow O’Rivven, the Bell” “Uncle Cornelius, His Story,” “The Butcher’s Bills,” and “Birth, Dreaming, Death.”

“I do not write,” MacDonald once said, “for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” Here then, for the childlike of all ages, is a collection of seven stories certain to delight both confirmed MacDonald readers and those about to meet him for the first time.

In this sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie has returned to his life as a miner and has dismissed the supernatural happenings of the past, believing them to have been a dream. When Curdie callously wounds a pigeon, his conscience leads him to Princess Irene’s mystical great-great-grandmother for help. She has him plunge his hands into a pile of rose petals that burns like fire. Extraordinarily, this grants him the power to see what kind of “animal” a person is at heart.
She then sends him on a quest, accompanied by a peculiar doglike creature named Lina, who was once a human. However, Curdie must resolve his own skepticism before he can use the powers granted him to defeat the evil that is threatening the future of the kingdom.

Admired by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and considered by W. H. Auden to be “the only English children’s book in the same class as the Alice books,” The Princess and the Goblin is a classic example of nineteenth-century children’s literary fairy tales. This is an ageless tale of courage and loyalty, beauty and mystery, and above all, good and evil.

The discovery of a secret stairway running to the top of the castle where she lives leads Princess Irene to a revelation even more weighty than the fiendish plans of the goblin community that Curdie, a miner boy, has discovered. Will the Princess and Curdie understand the significance of what they have found, or will Harelip and the goblins successfully execute their evil plan?

Young Princess Irene is sent to the country to be raised in a half-farmhouse, half-castle located in the side of a mountain. While exploring the top of the castle, Irene becomes lost and inexplicably finds her way to a mystifying and beautiful woman spinning a thread. Princess Irene discovers that this woman to which she is drawn is her great-great-grandmother. But after she returns, her nurse, Lootie, refuses to believe in the old woman’s existence, and the young princess cannot find the way back to her great-great-grandmother.
Days later, while on an outing with Lootie, Princess Irene believes that she detects a goblin. They meet a young miner, Curdie, who confirms her sighting. Soon Curdie discovers that goblins lurking under the castle have constructed an evil plot against the king and his palace. Princess Irene’s belief in her great-great-grandmother’s powers becomes essential as she and Curdie work to foil the sinister goblin plan. As the Princess tells Curdie, “Sometimes you must believe without seeing.”

A favorite author of C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald delivers another lovely tale in the story The Wise Woman. It is a story of two girls, one is a princess and the other a daughter of a shepherd; both are spoiled and self-serving. Their lives are forever changed when they encounter the Wise Woman, who undertakes to teach them virtue with an astounding balance of grace and truth. Firm and loving, the Wise Woman is everything a good parent could hope to be, and a refreshing portrayal of the Heavenly Parent of us all.