When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? Gregory Maguire has created a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again.

Liir is an adolescent boy last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Is he really Elphaba's son? He has her broom and her cape—but what of her powers? In an Oz that, since the Wizard's departure, is under new and dangerous management, can Liir keep his head down long enough to grow up?

While civil war looms in Oz, Brrr—the Cowardly Lion—surrenders the story of his life to a tetchy oracle named Yackle. Abandoned as a cub, Brrr's path from infancy in the Great Gillikan Forest is no Yellow Brick Road. Seeking to redress an early mistake, he trudges through a swamp of ghosts, becomes implicated in a massacre of trolls, falls in love with a forbidding Cat princess, and avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the war-mongering Emperor of Oz. A portrait of a would-be survivor and a panoramic glimpse of a world gone shrill with war fever, Gregory Maguire's A Lion Among Men is written with the sympathy and power that have made his books contemporary classics.

Out of Oz brilliantly reimagines L. Frank Baum’s world over the rainbow as wracked with social unrest—placing Glinda the good witch under house arrest and having the cowardly Lion on the lam from the law as the Emerald City prepares to make war on Munchkinland.