By Leigh Bardugo

Penguin, out now

An outside visitor to the Amazons’ island leads to Princess Diana entering the world of men, and helping to stop a dreadful global conflict…

That could be a description of the recent Patty Jenkins movie – in which the outside visitor is, of course, Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor – or Leigh Bardugo’s highly enjoyable and engrossing new novel, one of four to feature key DC characters to be published over the next few months. Unlike the movie, this isn’t a period piece: Warbringer is set contemporaneously, on yet another different world in the DC multiverse (maybe even the same one as Gwenda Bond’s Lois Lane trilogy is set?). From all accounts, there aren’t superheroes around, but pretty much everything else is the same. Diana is the young innocent, whose backstory and difference from those around her on Themiscyra is explained considerably better here than in either the movie or its novelisation, who rescues a young girl from a shipwreck, and inadvertently sets in motion events that could destroy her world.

Bardugo does a great job creating the Amazons’ world before Diana crashes into ours, but once the Amazon is in New York and elsewhere, she is treated as nowhere near the fish out of water that would be probably easier to write – this Diana has the benefit of a lot of knowledge of the world of Man, and while she doesn’t understand every nuance of current American slang, she is far more up to speed than you might expect.

Diana is on a quest through the book to save Aria, and a small band accretes around the pair, all of whom are well portrayed. There’s plenty of character building alongside the action sequences, and at the end, you share Diana’s hopes to be reunited with her friends – and revel in the way she deals with her enemies.

If DC are looking to bring Wonder Woman back to the small screen, they could do much worse than adapt this tale for a pilot – and you’d have to hope they’d entice Gal Gadot along for the ride, because I suspect like me, you’ll be imagining her throughout this fun novel.

Verdict: A great start to this series. 8/10

Paul Simpson