The Last Unicorn

The American author Peter S. Beagle published the fantasy novel The Last Unicorn in 1968, with The Bodley Head releasing it in the United Kingdom and Viking Press in the United States. It has appeared in at least 25 languages, and a 1987 poll of Locus subscribers ranked it fifth in a list of 33 all-time best fantasy novels. Palgrave Macmillan brought out an academic study devoted to it in 2024.

A unicorn lives alone in a lilac wood and hears a butterfly say that the others of her kind were herded away by a creature called the Red Bull. With no way of knowing whether it is true, she sets out to look for them and discovers that humans no longer recognise what she is, seeing only a pretty white mare. She is captured by a travelling circus run by a witch who keeps magical creatures as exhibits, including a harpy and a set of ordinary animals dressed up as wonders.

That is how she acquires the company of a magician called Schmendrick and a woman named Molly Grue. To get past King Haggard, who has been hunting her kind for years, Schmendrick turns her into a woman, which solves one problem and creates several, because she now has to work out what she is without the shape that used to answer the question. The quest takes the three of them through a country that has largely stopped believing in unicorns.

Beagle wrote the novel as a standalone story, and it has remained his best-known book, with a long afterlife in adaptation and in academic study. A sequel, The Way Home, was published decades later, and the 1968 novel is written as a self-contained fairy tale rather than the first of a series.