Madeleine L'Engle: The Polly O'Keefe Quartet

Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is one of the most beloved and influential novels for young readers ever written, a thrilling tale in which fourteen-year-old Meg Murry and her schoolmate Calvin O’Keefe use a tesseract to travel across space and time to save Meg’s scientist father from dire forces threatening the universe. But A Wrinkle in Time was only the beginning of the adventure. Now, for the first time, L’Engle’s iconic classic and all seven of its sequels—the complete Kairos (“cosmic time”) novels—are collected in a deluxe two-volume Library of America edition, together with never-seen-before deleted passages and hard-to-find essays in which L’Engle reflects on her work.

This second volume gathers the final four Kairos novels, in which Meg and Calvin’s daughter Polly takes center stage. In The Arm of the Starfish, Polly disappears, and Calvin’s research assistant is implicated in her kidnapping. In Dragons in the Waters, Polly and her brother Charles are on a steamer bound for Venezuela when they help solve a murder connected to a stolen portrait of Simon Bolivar. Polly receives an education in different kinds of love in A House Like a Lotus. And in An Acceptable Time, Polly is lured through a tesseract by a friend who may be hoping to sacrifice Polly in order to save himself.

A companion volume gathers the first four Kairos Novels, the Wrinkle in Time quartet, which also includes A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters.