A Crack In Time

It is Christmas afternoon and Peter gets an unexpected phone call from his parents, asking him to come. 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.  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, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling 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.  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  .Graham Joyce's Some Kind Of Fairy Tale  is a magical book that explores the concept of family even as it questions the nature of reality.