Book summary

Chickentown, Minnesota, is about a boring as a place can be--at least that is what teenaged Candy Quackenbush thinks. When confronted with a school assignment to learn about the town, however, Candy uncovers some interesting facts which lead her to a lighthouse on the outskirts of town. Before she really has time to think about why the landlocked town would have a lighthouse, though, she finds herself (and the lighthouse) whisked away to the land of Abarat, where magic rules and her best chance of survival is with an eight-headed con man who goes by the name of Mischief. This is the first volume of a projected quartet.

Media reviews

" Abarat is not a book in which plot is paramount. Above all, this is a deeply lovely catalogue of the strange. Islands carved into colossal heads, giant moths made of coloured ether, words that turn into aeroplanes, tentacled maggot-monsters: they dance past like a carnival, a true surrender to the weird, vastly more inventive than the tired figures that visit some bespectacled boy-wizards. The joy is that all these imagined things are enthusiastically illustrated by Barker himself."