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The Great Troll War

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 . . .

Jasper Fforde

Фэнтези18+

Contents

About the Author

Also by Jasper Fforde

Title Page

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 Bellerophon

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

About the Author

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. Since then he has written another fifteen novels, including the Number One Sunday Times bestseller One of our Thursdays is Missing, and the Last Dragonslayer series, adapted for television by Sky.

Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.

<emphasis>Also by Jasper Fforde</emphasis>

The Thursday Next Series

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 Nursery Crime Series

The Big Over Easy

The Fourth Bear

Shades of Grey

Early Riser

The Constant Rabbit

The Dragonslayer Series

(for young adult readers)

The Last Dragonslayer

The Song of the Quarkbeast

The Eye of Zoltar

The Great Troll War

THE GREAT TROLL WAR

Jasper Fforde

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

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

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

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

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.

<emphasis>Where We Are Now</emphasis>

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, her. The kid with the Dragons.

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.

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