Like the Narnia books, the Earthsea Cycle got stuck in the kid-lit ghetto, the walls of which wouldn’t come down until 1997, thanks to a suspiciously similar coming-of-age fantasy about a scar-faced boy with an animal companion who attends a school for wizards and battles his malevolent shadow. Unlike world-famous imitators such as these – and let’s not forget George Lucas and Star Wars while we’re at it – the Earthsea Cycle never became a merch-friendly brand, nor achieved the unholy grail of becoming a franchise.