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Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a very English story. A story of woods and clearings, a story of folk tales and family histories. It is as if Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris had written a Fairy Tale together. It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery. He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she's back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim. But her stories don't quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara's one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...

SFX a écrit :Release Date: 21 June 2012288 pages | £9.99 (hardback)/£5.99 (eBook)Author: Graham JoycePublisher: GollanczWhile occasionally flirting with full-blown fantasy (The Tooth Fairy), Graham Joyce more often writes novels that exist on the very edges of the genre, in which elements of the supernatural are delicately woven into the real-world plots like gossamer threads (Smoking Poppy, The Facts Of Life). In these stories, the fantasy elements are like magic from a unseen parallel universe that seeps into ours almost unnoticed, only affecting – often almost imperceptibly – one character. Anything odd or bizarre that happens would either be missed by most other characters or easily rationalised.In Some Kind Of Fairytale Joyce tackles this theme head on. The central mystery is enticingly simple. Tara, a girl who went missing as a teenager, returns to her parents’ house nearly 20 years later, looking barely any older. She claims that she’s been away with the fairies – not her exact words, but the interpretation her sceptical relatives and ex-boyfriend glean from her story – and that for her only six months have passed. When her family send her to a shrink to get “real” answers, she willingly agrees, hoping it will prove her tale is true.The book is as much about the effect Tara’s disappearance had on her family and friends as it is about discovering the veracity of her story. Full of engaging characters, moments of beautiful prose, and Joyce’s trademark ability to evoke the magic in the English countryside, it’s an utterly beguiling and deceptively complex tale, with a teasing conclusion that makes you want to read it all over again immediately.

Il y a vingt ans, une adolescente nommée Tara disparaît sans laisser de trace. Son corps n'a jamais été retrouvé, et sa famille a fini par accepter son deuil. Pourtant, le soir de Noël, on frappe trois coups à la porte. Sur le seuil se tient une jeune fille qui ressemble étrangement à Tara. Et elle a l'air toujours aussi jeune... après la joie des retrouvailles, des questions se posent. Peter, qui ne croit pas aux miracles, croit encore moins à l'histoire de sa soeur, qui prétend avoir été enlevée par des fées...