The Juniper Tree [Paperback]

A modern reimagining of a classic fairy tale by one of most bewitching, idiosyncratic British writers of the twentieth century.

Bella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whose name she didn’t quite catch, and her once pretty face is disfigured by the scar she acquired in a car accident. Friendless and without family, she’s recently disentangled herself from a selfish and indifferent boyfriend and a cruel and indifferent mother. But she shares a quality common to Barbara Comyns’s other heroines: a bracingly unsentimental ability to carry on. Before too long, Bella has found not only a job but a vocation; not only a place to live but a home and a makeshift family. As Comyns’s novel progresses, the story echoes and inverts the Brothers Grimm’s macabre taleThe Juniper Tree. Will Bella’s hard-won restoration to life and love come at the cost of the happiness of others? A treasure from the 1980s...[The Juniper Tree] picks up the Grimm notion that an excess of maternal happiness can prove fatal...Comyns's prose is vivid and charmingly hurried... The Grimm story is about evil, revenge, and justice—an eye for an eye—butThe Juniper Treeis about accidents, damage, and repair. —Christine Smallwood,Harper's

“The novel . . . achieves a life of its own, and allows Bella to emerge at last from her ordeal with a feminist, fertile, happy, fairy-tale ending. Hypnotic and enthralling in the process.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful . . . there’s also something uniquely original about her voice. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —Lucy Scholes,The Observer

“The Juniper Tree