The blurb:
It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phone call 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, disheveled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent traveling 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 woman 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...
I don't know how, but this is somehow the most English book I have read since The Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper, or maybe Watership Down. There's just something about it that makes it feel like it could not take place anywhere else in the world.
The synopsis is that teenager Tara Martin disappears one day — and then reappears 20 years later, on Christmas Day. She looks completely unchanged, still far younger than she should be. She can't — or won't — give much detail about where she's been, until she talks to her brother alone, and reveals that she unwittingly followed another man to what is essentially the fae realm. Naturally Peter, a very practical man, has some trouble with this.
The novel dives into the repercussions that Tara's disappearance had on the family, and into the effects of her reappearance. Her then-boyfriend (and Peter's best friend) Richie hasn't had a good couple of decades: he's a very talented musician but police and the Martin family blamed him for Tara's disappearance, even if he was never charged, and he's spent the years with assorted substance abuse issues among other things. Oddly, Tara's reappearance prompts a rapprochement between Peter and Richie.
There's another character who initially just seems to be neighbourhood set dressing too: Mrs Larwood, who lives next door. Let's just say it turns out that Tara isn't the only person who's ever made an accidental journey to the fae realm and made it home again, and the old lady has some advice for Tara on coping with her situation. She's a contrast to the psychiatrist, Dr Underwood, that the family takes Tara to see at least.
There's a rather marked shift in Tara's faery lover's behaviour towards the end. It's an illustration of the different morality and reasoning of the otherworldly folk, but it does also feel rather sudden and without much foreshadowing.
But I enjoyed the book overall. It's not prompting me to seek out any other of his books, but it was an interesting read.
Started: 6 June 2025
Finished: 9 June 2025
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