“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