There is a changeling in this story—but who?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and Modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own joy at bringing new life to the world.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh and worth every moment of difficult labor. But after just a few nights, something seems amiss, changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Meanwhile, the world around them continues in its humdrum ease. Tom works toward a promotion, urging Madeleine to connect with other moms and keep in touch with her colleagues. Her parents travel from abroad to meet the baby, but Madeleine is unnerved by her father’s new obsession with genealogy and DNA tests. Interrupted by visions, panicked at her lack of maternal feelings, shut out from her old life, she frantically searches for answers. But the old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed. And fairies do more than kidnap babies.
A riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered, Emily McBride’s Queen Mab asks us to reconsider what is real and how we might see a truer picture of ourselves through the darkness.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and Modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own joy at bringing new life to the world.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh and worth every moment of difficult labor. But after just a few nights, something seems amiss, changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Meanwhile, the world around them continues in its humdrum ease. Tom works toward a promotion, urging Madeleine to connect with other moms and keep in touch with her colleagues. Her parents travel from abroad to meet the baby, but Madeleine is unnerved by her father’s new obsession with genealogy and DNA tests. Interrupted by visions, panicked at her lack of maternal feelings, shut out from her old life, she frantically searches for answers. But the old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed. And fairies do more than kidnap babies.
A riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered, Emily McBride’s Queen Mab asks us to reconsider what is real and how we might see a truer picture of ourselves through the darkness.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Queen Mab is a spellbinding account of early motherhood that asks: where do we go when we see through the myth and how do we make it safely to the other side? Emily McBride writes with both poetic force and clarity, her powerful prose weaving a fairy world of its own." - Lana Bastašić
"A novel of great intimacy that exacts real gravitational pull, Queen Mab plunges deep into the specific loneliness of new motherhood and the way it rewrites our world order. From a visceral understanding of the shifts in a woman's mind as she changes states, it crosses into the animal and fairy worlds and beyond-into questions of origin and the search for wholeness across time and text. Its peculiar beauties and horrors are told through an unclouded lens, never not funny and always tender, and in prose that is alive, charged by its own velocity." - Claudia Dey
"McBride opened a portal with the strength and eeriness of her vision: I couldn't walk away from the portal as the journey into the novel became wilder and wilder. Queen Mab is smart, unsettling and tender at the same time." - Claudia Durastanti
"For readers seeking a book that will shake them, Queen Mab casts its eerie spell slowly, steadily deepening a spiral of misgivings and dread and changelings, until they are entirely entranced and carried away." - Doireann Ní Ghríofa
"Peering into the half-light between madness and sanity, motherhood and ancestry, birth and death, Queen Mab investigates the impossible strangeness of knowing ourselves. As gray cats and foxes watch from the hedge, the fairies make their mischief and a woman is transformed. Who are we? Who will we be? A brave and powerful guide, Emily McBride divines unexpected answers from old stories and new questions." - Samantha Hunt
"Both darkly funny and devastating, I was riveted by this tale of unravelling with a new baby. The metamorphosis of early motherhood and its shapeshifting realities is keenly observed. The novel pulls you slowly and ever-deeper into a world of claustrophobic dread and dark enchantment, but never strays too far from examining the labour, isolation and upended identity that every new mother faces. It's an important tale expertly told." - Rebecca Sarah Ley
"Here is the story of a new mother, whose way of relating to her newborn seems, at first, to be more or less rational, until it begins to morph into something a little mysterious-then possibly dangerous-and ultimately terrifying. Hang on for the ride: Queen Mab is strange and bold. It takes no prisoners. This story gripped me. It enchanted me." - Claire Oshetsky
"So clever and ethereal and nimble at moving between the realist and the fabulist, and so perfectly captures those psychedelic, feral postpartum days, and the unexpected entry into wildness you experience when you give birth. It's just so good!" - Madeleine Watts
"A novel of great intimacy that exacts real gravitational pull, Queen Mab plunges deep into the specific loneliness of new motherhood and the way it rewrites our world order. From a visceral understanding of the shifts in a woman's mind as she changes states, it crosses into the animal and fairy worlds and beyond-into questions of origin and the search for wholeness across time and text. Its peculiar beauties and horrors are told through an unclouded lens, never not funny and always tender, and in prose that is alive, charged by its own velocity." - Claudia Dey
"McBride opened a portal with the strength and eeriness of her vision: I couldn't walk away from the portal as the journey into the novel became wilder and wilder. Queen Mab is smart, unsettling and tender at the same time." - Claudia Durastanti
"For readers seeking a book that will shake them, Queen Mab casts its eerie spell slowly, steadily deepening a spiral of misgivings and dread and changelings, until they are entirely entranced and carried away." - Doireann Ní Ghríofa
"Peering into the half-light between madness and sanity, motherhood and ancestry, birth and death, Queen Mab investigates the impossible strangeness of knowing ourselves. As gray cats and foxes watch from the hedge, the fairies make their mischief and a woman is transformed. Who are we? Who will we be? A brave and powerful guide, Emily McBride divines unexpected answers from old stories and new questions." - Samantha Hunt
"Both darkly funny and devastating, I was riveted by this tale of unravelling with a new baby. The metamorphosis of early motherhood and its shapeshifting realities is keenly observed. The novel pulls you slowly and ever-deeper into a world of claustrophobic dread and dark enchantment, but never strays too far from examining the labour, isolation and upended identity that every new mother faces. It's an important tale expertly told." - Rebecca Sarah Ley
"Here is the story of a new mother, whose way of relating to her newborn seems, at first, to be more or less rational, until it begins to morph into something a little mysterious-then possibly dangerous-and ultimately terrifying. Hang on for the ride: Queen Mab is strange and bold. It takes no prisoners. This story gripped me. It enchanted me." - Claire Oshetsky
"So clever and ethereal and nimble at moving between the realist and the fabulist, and so perfectly captures those psychedelic, feral postpartum days, and the unexpected entry into wildness you experience when you give birth. It's just so good!" - Madeleine Watts
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