The Children by Melissa Albert

Some stories follow you home. This one might linger in the hallway just outside your bedroom door.

From New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert comes an intoxicating, haunting new novel about legacy, memory, and the dark roots beneath a beloved fantasy series.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods. In one, she’s a household name—the magical heroine of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books. In the other, she and her brother grow up near-feral in the lichen-clotted woods of an isolated Vermont farmhouse, unwashed and underfed, far from the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine. Then comes the night it all goes up in flames, leaving the series unfinished and the children its only survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother’s name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother announces an art installation titled Mother. Rumors swirl. A death surfaces. And the questions she’s spent twenty years running from begin to crack her careful facade. What really happened the night of the fire?

This is a book for anyone who’s ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light—where the line between magic and memory blurs, and the authors we imagined turn out to be something else entirely.

Gothic, literary, and deliciously unsettling, The Children is the kind of thriller that begs to be read in one sitting. Preferably by lamplight. Preferably on a salty, rain-soaked afternoon, with the cove rolling just outside.

Pour the tea. Settle in. Just maybe leave the hall light on.

Additional information