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Welcome!

Welcome to my brand new website, with huge thanks to the generosity of Creative New Zealand and the web design brilliance of Brence Coghill at Monstrous. I am over the moon to announce that my new middlegrade fantasy The Grimmelings is out now in New Zealand and Australia with the wonderful folks at Allen & Unwin and is coming to the UK in May 2024 with Guppy Books. Please enjoy this cover reveal… illustrated by Max Thompson and designed by Katrina Duncan, with the video magic by Jonathan King (yes we are related).

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Praise for Rachael King

The Grimmelings is a compelling, lovingly-crafted novel about magic, liminal spaces (of several kinds), language and folkloric fusion. Rachael King’s characters live and breathe. Her dialogue glitters quietly. She discovers new perspectives in inherited narratives to create a world that is familiar yet unexpected, tense and eery with flashes of beauty.

David MitchellCloud Atlas

“[Italo] Calvino explores the idea that all great literature exhibits the qualities of Quickness, Lightness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity. All these qualities inhered in perfect measure in Rachael King’s novel The Sound of Butterflies. The story of traumatised lepidopterist Thomas Edgar had such a quiet and unsettling power that I found myself dreaming of the Amazon for weeks after finishing the book.

Eleanor CattonThe Luminaries

Susan Cooper for the next generation... King writes with the utmost respect for her readers, for the story and for language itself. The Grimmelings is a beautifully written story of old magic, uncontainable, unpredictable, wild and true – I could not put it down. And although the phrase is thrown around a lot, this genuinely is a future classic.

Zana FraillonThe Bone Sparrow, The Raven’s Song

Splendidly inventive, expertly controlled, full of passion and compassion, and a narrative I would give four fingernails to have thought of. I read it in two big gulps, walking around in the middle and muttering words of admiration mixed with words of envy.

David Hill

YOUNGER
READERS

middle grade & junior readers

ADULT
BOOKS

not for children
a bit about

Rachael King

I’m a writer, book reviewer and former literary festival director from Aotearoa New Zealand. I love music and started playing bass guitar in rock bands when I was 15, but these days I spend more time listening than playing. When I was young, I tried to ride every horse I met and could often be found galloping bareback along a beach with the wind in my hair.

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