After Alice: A Novel

From the multi-million-copy bestselling author of Wicked comes a magical new twist on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Lewis’s Carroll’s beloved classic.

When Alice toppled down the rabbit-hole 150 years ago, she found a Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But what of that world? How did 1860s Oxford react to Alice’s disappearance?

In this brilliant work of fiction, Gregory Maguire turns his dazzling imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings—and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll’s enduring tale. Ada, a friend of Alice’s mentioned briefly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is off to visit her friend, but arrives a moment too late—and tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.

Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and see her safely home from this surreal world below the world. If Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life. Either way, everything that happens next is “After Alice.”

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Published Oct 27, 2015

304 pages

Average rating: 5.43

14 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

Cyn's Workshop
Aug 20, 2025
6/10 stars
A New Realm of Exploration | Review of ‘After Alice’

Gregory Maguire is known for his retellings within the narrative world and for this novel he has tapped into the writing style of Lewis Carroll. For anyone who has ever read the original tale of Alice in Wonderland will see the resemblance in writing styles and how Maguire was able to tap into his technique of writing and tell this tale of Alice’s friend Ada who is briefly mentioned in the original[...]

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JLeutz
Feb 10, 2025
8/10 stars
A very good story interwoven with the life of people from Oxford and added characters traveling through Wonderland
katietopp
Jan 01, 2025
6/10 stars
I'm honestly a bit bummed by this book, I love Gregory Maguire, but this wasn't his best work. I also adore the Looking Glass series, and I thought this story line had a lot of potential. I expected much more, I would recommend other of his books before this one every time.
margardenlady
Dec 27, 2023
8/10 stars
I always enjoy reading Maguire. His use of language is rich with nuance and depth. I often feel a bit stretched in terms of vocabulary. The whimsy and imagination in his books is what I especially crave and this reimagining of Alice's adventures, with the aid of two other children: Ada, the unpopular neighbor girl and Siam, a young boy visiting from America is delightfully absurd.
Mara M. Zonderman
Aug 01, 2023
6/10 stars
I'm very grateful to Gregory Maguire that he chose not to set the entirety of the book with Ada after she falls down the rabbit hole after Alice. The parts that were set down there were tiresome enough. Lewis Carroll did Wonderland and Gregory Maguire has nothing new to add there, aside from more convoluted language that can be painful to read. I love Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and I smiled to see some favorite characters again, but even those smiles were few and far between, and bookended by frustration at having to wade through tortured language (yes, I get that he was going for a style similar to Carroll's, but it didn't work for me). Unfortunately, although the "real world" scenes provide relief from Maguire's interpretation of Wonderland, there's very little else to recommend them.

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