The final instalment of the Last Dragonslayer Chronicles, demonstrating that with a small band of committed followers, a large tin of resolve and steely determination, almost anything can be achieved . . . Sixteen-year-old Jennifer Strange and her sidekick and fellow Orphan Tiger Prawns have been driven to the tip of the UnUnited Kingdoms - Cornwall - by the invasion of the Trolls. Their one defence is a six-foot-wide trench full of buttons, something which the Trolls find unaccountably terrifying (it's their clickiness). Worse than being eaten by Trolls is the prospect of the Mighty Shandar requisitioning the Quarkbeast and using him to achieve supreme power and domination - an ambition that has been four hundred years in the planning and which will ultimately leave the Earth a cold cinder, devoid of all life. Nothing has ever looked so bleak, but Jennifer, assisted by a renegade vegan Troll, a bunch of misfit sorcerers, the Princess (or is she now the ruler?) of the UnUnited (or are they now United?) Kingdoms, and Tiger, must find a way to vanquish the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen, and along the way discover the truth about her parents, herself, and what is in the locked glovebox of her VW Beetle . . .
About the Author
Also by Jasper Fforde
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Where We Are Now
Princesses
The Sorcerer’s Conclave
Sir Matt Grifflon
The Mighty Shandar
Troll Defence
The Troll
Dinner
Moll the Troll
This HENRY totally sucks
Aboard the
Breaking the Spaniel Barrier
Inside Shandar’s Tower
Wedding bells
King Mathew Speaks
The Meeting
Kevin sees it all
The Worriers
Cloud Leviathan
Colin and the Princess
The One True Monarch
Molly Reveals Herself
Humans v. Trolls
We say goodbye
The Mighty Shandar
Jupiter and Beyond
Epilogue
Footnotes
Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the
Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
First Among Sequels
One of Our Thursdays is Missing
The Woman Who Died a Lot
The Big Over Easy
The Fourth Bear
Shades of Grey
Early Riser
The Constant Rabbit
The Last Dragonslayer
The Song of the Quarkbeast
The Eye of Zoltar
The Great Troll War
Jasper Fforde
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Jasper Fforde 2021
The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover image: © Jo Wilson
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 444 79995 8
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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For my eldest great-grandchild.
Sorry about the state of the planet.
We knew what we had to do – we just didn’t.
There was no excuse.
Trolls. I was staring at one just then. He was about twenty feet tall, dressed in a loincloth, a pair of leather boots and on top of his unusually small head was a dead goat. I’m not a massive expert on Trolls, but apparently they wear rotting animals in the same way as humans wear perfume: to disguise their smell and make them more attractive. To each other, obviously. I like to think myself fairly broad-minded but even I would have to admit Trolls are pretty loathsome in manner, looks and eating habits.
So who am I? Jennifer Strange. S-T-R-A-N-G-E. Rhymes with ‘Grange’. Y’know, the sixteen-year-old who was running Kazam, the House of Enchantment?
No?
Then how about this: I was the Last Dragonslayer.
Right,
The Troll was holding a large club that was once the rear axle of a truck, and it looked as though he not only knew how to use it, but already had. His skin was rough, had the colour of mouldy bread and boasted an impressive display of intricate tattoos. Some were geometric and purely for decoration, but others were more practical: owing to a long mistrust of pen and paper, the left Troll leg is reserved for a part of their written history, and the right for recipes, to-do lists and bawdy limericks. But no fools when it comes to data integrity, Trolls back themselves up, just in case – they have often been observed with identical tattoos.
