‘Wicked’s’ Gregory McGuire Will Tell Galinda’s Origin Story in New Book

Galinda Upland has an announcement! Her childhood story will be told in Gregory Maguire’s latest novel.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West novelist Gregory Maguire is taking readers back to Oz, and telling the story of Glinda the Good Witch in a new novel. The novel will follow the story of the Good Witch played by Ariana Grande in the Wicked films, opposite Cynthia Erivo‘s Elphaba.

Maguire is releasing Galinda: A Charmed Childhood in September 2026.

The forthcoming novel will chronicle the famed Good Witch’s childhood. “The youngest of four children in a high-born family down on their luck, Galinda is both pampered and ignored,” the book’s description reads.

“Her natural grace promises to elevate her in the district dance competitions — but these efforts distract her from seeing the growing resentments of local merchants who disapprove of her family’s business strategies. Enmired in the self-satisfactions and unnamed timidities of childhood, Galinda finds in herself neither canniness nor the need to cultivate it.”

The description concludes: “However, as her father deftly pivots around the snares and nets laid for him by his competitors, Galinda begins to dance toward a life that might lift her above her proud, if hardscrabble, childhood.”

Galinda will come 30 years after Wicked was first published in 1995. The Wicked novel was itself inspired by L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which famously itself led to the 1939 flick, The Wizard of Oz.

In the years that followed Maguire’s Wicked, the author chronicled more stories from the Wizard of Oz‘s characters, releasing Son of a Witch (2005), A Lion Among Men (2008) and Out of Oz (2011).

Notably, years after the 1995 release of the Wicked book came the 2003 Tony-winning Broadway musical, followed by the blockbuster 2024 and 2025 films.

After the release of Wicked: Part 1 movie, Maguire told PEOPLE that watching the film adaptation was both a memorable and emotional experience. Though the author was not directly involved in the film’s creative process, he cried through the whole movie when he attended the Hollywood premiere with his family.

“I am enormously proud of it,” Maguire said. He’s also quick to recognize the talent of the four actresses who’ve brought Elphaba and Glinda to life: Grande and Erivo, as well as Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the characters on Broadway.

“The times that I have run into them, I feel like they’re my first cousins,” Maguire says. “They are so extraordinarily warm … we fall upon each other as if we’ve known each other our whole lives.”

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Galinda: A Charmed Childhood will hit shelves on Sept. 29, 2026. The book is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.