Published on: Sept 01, 2025 03:12 pm IST
Author Allison King’s debut novel, The Phoenix Pencil Company is sure to leave you with a case of the sniffles and some newfound nostalgia. Read to know more.
Sometimes you can’t quite put your finger on what it is that’s making a stack of inked pages tug on the wells inside you, but you stick with it nonetheless. Luckily with Allison King’s The Phoenix Pencil Company, you’ll be glad you stuck around. And that’s probably because the plot of the book is in a way, storytelling.
Cover of the book, The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King(Photo: Instagram/4thestatebooks)
Be it Monica’s incredibly relatable contemporary struggles or her grandmother, the Alzheimer’s-stricken Meng’s war-ravaged past, at the heart of it, it’s two women eking out their business of living, one more conflicted, the other more dramatic. And what ties it all together? Pencils, and the magic that lives in them — and to Allison’s credit, a core plot point you will barely find yourself questioning because you’ll just want to believe it.
Now keeping a pair of small-font accustomed eyes for some 400 odd pages is never an easy feat and more often than not happens to be the exact beat on which debuting novelists falter. Not to call Allison’s storytelling flawless, but the blimps feel ‘real’ in a human sense and the slight hesitation and oddly comforting sense of lull at times feel incredibly raw, qualities that seem to be missing in the increasingly finessed reads hitting the stands these days.
Long story short — looking for a good emotional release as the rain beats down on your windows this weekend? There couldn’t be a warmer pat than The Phoenix Pencil Company.
Title: The Phoenix Pencil Company
Author: Allison King
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: ₹ ₹499
