Magic Kingdom For Sale/Sold!

Terry Brooks published Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold! in 1986, and it opens the series he called the Magic Kingdom of Landover; it is the book in which most readers meet Ben Holiday. It was reissued in 2009 as part of an omnibus of the series.

Its central figure is Ben Holiday, a trial lawyer in Chicago who is still grieving the death of his wife and their unborn child in a car accident. Browsing an upmarket Christmas catalogue, he finds an advertisement offering a whole kingdom of magic in exchange for a million dollars, placed by a man who calls himself Mr. Meeks, and although he is sceptical he follows it up because he needs a reason to begin again.

He is given a medallion and carried through a swirling mist to Landover, a kingdom that connects a number of other worlds, ringed by the Fairy Mist where the creatures of Fairy live. What he finds there is not what was advertised, and the novel is about what he does with a bargain that turns out to have conditions attached.