Fairy Tale

After being visited by four men in suits, Eloise declares herself determined to have a baby. She begins behaving very strangely indeed, and takes to wandering in the hills of her Welsh home. Then she returns from her wanderings with a newborn baby. Did she steal it?

From Publishers Weekly

Strange goings-on in the Welsh countryside lie at the center of Booker Prize-nominee Alice Thomas Ellis's Fairy Tale, a "supernatural comedy of manners" first published in 1996 in the U.K. Young Eloise's rural ennui is broken by intrusions from the spirit world, including the appearance of four mysterious men in black, a changeling child and the ability to walk in a rainstorm without getting wet. Unbeknownst to her and her boyfriend, Simon, they are the intruders in a land ruled by the Kings of the Heights. A pleasantly diverting take on an old genre, this is perhaps too self-consciously quirky to grab a large U.S. audience. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher

Ellis¹ most recent novel is a contemporary fable, unearthly yet worldly-wise. It centers on a little brick house in an isolated valley in deepest Wales, to which a young couple move from the city in search of a life in touch with nature. At first, the idyllic retreat is everything they¹d hoped, but when four incongruous visitors one day arrive at the little house, uncanny and inexplicable things begin to happen. New Afterword by Thomas Meagher.

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