The Changeling

Almost half a century after its first publication, The Changeling remains as disturbing as it is visionary. Joy Williams is considered a virtuoso stylist and independent thinker.

When we first meet Pearl - young in years but ahead of her time in drinking - she is on the run. In a hotel bar in Florida, she downs gin and tonics while her infant sleeps in the crook of her arm. But her escape doesn't last long: she is soon led back to an island in the Northeast that belongs to her violent husband's family. For Pearl, this island is a place of madness and pain; her unceasing drinking fuels the one while merely numbing the other.

With The Changeling, Williams - as Rick Moody writes - combines the captivating improbabilities of magical realism with the surrealism of a folkloric retelling and the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano. The result is something wholly distinctive and deeply gripping.