I do not think I know how to tell you about this book.

Honestly. Sometimes a book would come along in my bookselling life that I would absolutely love and be absolutely incapable of selling because I couldn’t describe it. Because I would open my mouth to describe it and this excited jumble of…well, crap…would come out. You could actually watch the kid’s eyes glaze over. Sometimes I gave up trying to sell the poor book, or I would make my friend Sarah read it and come up with a hook, because she could sell wind power to oil salesmen.

(Really. There are many customers who will only buy books from Sarah. She can make you want to read anything on the planet. If she ever starts posting here you will never read anything I write again.)

So what can I tell you about Lyonesse: The Well Between the Worlds that might make you want to read it instead of back away in horror? Because this is one of those books – one of those books I love that I feel incapable of describing.

I can tell you that Sam Llewellyn is a brilliant writer. This man is destined to be big. I know he has other books in print, including the Little Darlings series from Penguin, but I’d honestly never heard of him before. But this book – oh, this book is good. It is a very loose retelling of the King Arthur myth, which I didn’t realize when I began it (otherwise I might have rolled my eyes or something). It has a fairly intricate world-build to it, so you do have to pay attention while reading – I found myself backtracking more than once, making sure I was keeping various people and magicks straight – but the payoff if you do is a big one. This book has magic and adventure and myth and environmentalism and intrigue and shady government affairs and war and strong families and laughter and sorrow AND a strong female character in addition to the male main character.

Instead of describing this book horribly and making you all run for cover, I’m just going to quote the back cover copy off the galley and hope that it plus my sincere rave about Llewellyn’s writing makes you seek it out:

Long before King Arthur and the Round Table, in the land of Lyonesse, a sword stood plunged in a stone…

Once, this country was green and pleasant. Now the land is sinking, and the sea batters its walls. Lyonesse has become a place of poison and danger, and its people live in an uneasy truce with the monsters that inhabit its bottomless Wells.

Idris Limpet is an ordinary boy, until the day he is rescued from a terrible death and finds himself thrown into an astonishing new adventure.  Can it be that it is his destiny to save Lyonesse? And can one boy and one girl stand in the way of a colossal evil with its roots sunk deep in ages of wickedness?