Description

There is a changeling in this story, but who is it?

Madeleine, a promising grad student, is newly married when her baby daughter Maud arrives-perfect despite a traumatic labour. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with a kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when she wasn’t paying attention? Is her real daughter elsewhere, dancing in the half-light with sprites and foxes?

As her husband Tom continues with his day-to-day, working toward a promotion, Madeleine slips further into violent visions. Panicked at her lack of maternal love and shut out from her old life, she turns to what she knows best, literature, for answers. The old myths and stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, after all the fairies don’t just kidnap babies-they’re partial to young women too. Is Maud the changeling, or is it Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?

Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us and the families who keep us tethered.

Publisher Review

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, author of Strangers I Know 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 Ni Ghriofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat 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, author of Elegy, Southwest 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, author of Bad Fiction 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, author of The Dark Dark 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, author of Daughter 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, author of Chouette 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 Bastasic, author of Catch the Rabbit A literature scholar attempts to cope with her postpartum depression by diving into a fantasy world in this artful debut from McBride. . . Seamlessly weaves fantasy into the increasingly suspenseful narrative, which builds to a powerful crescendo * Publishers Weekly * A young woman’s travels to and through the lands of motherhood and mental illness are chronicled with brutal clarity in McBride’s debut novel. . . A harrowing tale of mothering and myth * Kirkus Reviews * ‘There’s magic-or madness-in McBride’s debut, much as in stories of Queen Mab, but there’s also a visceral and real sense of the characters’ daily lives. . . The book is about how motherhood disrupts a woman’s academic ambitions, how the stories people immerse themselves in can rewrite their internal and external realities, and more. . . McBride establishes herself as someone ready to write (and be read) alongside authors of Helen Oyeyemi’s skill with this powerful exploration of the poetics and politics of motherhood’ * Library Journal *