The Changeling
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
When we first meet Pearl - young in years but advanced in her drinking - she's sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics. Cradled in the crook of her arm is her infant son. But the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn't last for long. Soon she's being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her drinking might dull the latter but it spurs on the former.
Through the lens of Pearl's fragile consciousness, readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has created a modern fairy-tale, entirely original and entirely consuming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A scathing 1978 New York Times review by Anatole Broyard was enough, according to Fairy Tale Review editor Kate Bernheimer, to knock this second novel by 2001 Pulitzer finalist (for The Quick and the Dead) and 1974 NBA finalist (for State of Grace) Williams quickly out of print. This 30th anniversary edition aims to redress the book's poor initial reception. A preface by Rick Moody prepares readers for a folklore-tinged look at "the lucky and unlucky fortunes of a drink afflicted young woman called Pearl." The book casts its spell immediately, opening on a "not so bad" bar where Pearl sits drinking gin and tonics, "an infant in the crook of her right arm."
