Spindle's End

Spindle’s End is a fairy tale, but also a long, leisurely, sophisticated narrative which makes no linguistic compromises, and demands readers able to cope with such sentences as ‘Katriona let the confused provenance of this metaphor pass in silence’. Bits and pieces of many traditional fairy tales are fed into the story of Rosie, a child princess, firstborn and heiress of the king and queen in a land where benevolent fairies and magicians are accepted citizens. The long-desired baby is cursed on her name-day by the wicked fairy Pernicia, who threatens that on her twenty-first birthday she will die, poisoned by a sharp spindle end. In the court’s confusion Rosie is rescued by a humble country fairy, Katriona, and raised in protective ordinariness hidden from Pernicia’s malice. Of course she is eventually found, and a battle for survival ensues. The unnamed country is a strange place, because Pernicia is its only source of evil, and even she lives outside its bounds; within the borders fairies, humans and animals live in idyllic harmony. As a fairy tale Spindle’s End’s subject is magical perils, but as a novel it is an almost utopian love story. A curious and distinctive book, but one with no obvious readership.