Half World
Illustrated by Jillian Tamaki. Melanie Tamaki is an outsider. Unpopular and impoverished, she is the only child of a loving but
neglectful mother. She barely copes with surviving school and life. But
everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is
missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself
Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical
journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize
is that the state of the universe is at stake... Award winning author, Hiromi Goto's novel is an adventurous,
genre-bending fantasy of shape-shifting characters, tortured half
lives, and redemption. “A haunting combination of a coming-of-age story and a spiritual quest... Wonderfully odd, and quite unforgettable.” — Neil Gaiman
“An absolute treasure of a book, one of those hidden gems that deserves as wide an audience as possible.” — Charles de Lint
Hiromi Goto
Hiromi Goto (born 1966) is a Canadian novelist.
Born in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, her family emigrated to Canada in 1969, settling in British Columbia. She studied at the University of Calgary and now lives in Burnaby, British Columbia.
Goto's first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), won a 1995 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was co-winner of the 1996 Canada-Japan Book Award. Her novel The Kappa Child won the Tiptree Award for gender-bending science fiction.
From September 2008 to May 2009, Goto was the Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University.