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Rundell wants her readers to love dragons - and John Donne - as much as she does.
LONDON - Dragons never go out of style; so naturally, one of them arcs across the cover of Katherine Rundell's "Impossible Creatures," wings unfurled for maximum glory. That seems to have done the trick: The novel, newly available in the States, was an instant bestseller when it came out in Britain last year. It would be easy to overlook the little guy at the bottom left of the illustration - a baby griffin named Gelifen. He is the last of his kind and the true heart of Rundell's story, in which two kids, Mal and Christopher, must save a magic realm from environmental catastrophe. Griffins are "joy birds," a scientist tells them. "Cornucopial life admirers."
That also describes Rundell, a fellow at St. Catherine's College at Oxford and the latest in that university's celebrated tradition of scholar-fantasists - C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman...
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‘All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.’