Hailing from a small, independent Newcastle publisher (just the way we like ‘em) this debut novel reads as a prose-poem meditation on faerie lore clearly penned by an author whose work is informed not just by the popular re-telling of folk tales, but by their mediaeval literary sources. Thus she creates her characters from a web of words studded with fantastic names – Whipitee Stourie, Nuckalavee, Nut-Nan – in a world of “bugs, bogies, boguns and bogles.” The wandering heroine, charged with being a changeling and exiled from what sounds like a post-apocalyptic village settlement, finds her destiny in the weird woods where the dense forest creates its own reality, peopled by the shadowy denizens of British folklore, rooted in their landscape and constantly engaged in an existence of riddles, tricks, quests, obligations and confrontations. With her pony, Poem, she must negotiate the wiles of half-revealed beings and the shifting, half-understood rules from which their world is shaped. Go with the flow of the prose and the pleasures of the words to get the most from this original voice.

Published by Inkylab

Gail-Nina Anderson