Some Kind of Fairy Tale

What really happened to Tara Martin?

Was it all just a fairy tale?

Twenty years ago, teenaged Tara Martin disappeared in the dense--some say enchanted--forest known as the Outwoods on the edge of a small town in central England. Her parents and her brother, Peter, feared the unthinkable; her troubled boyfriend, Richie, was the last known person to be with her, but there were no signs of any wrongdoing. Police and naighbors searched the Outwoods for days, but weekes turned into months and her family slowly gave up hope. Tara's disappearance was left unsolved.

Now, twenty years after her disappearance, a knock at the door on Christmas Day brings an overwhelming sight: Tara, disheveled and exhausted but very much alive. Her explanation for her absence comes hesitantly, and does not seem logical--especially when she confides to Peter, now a forty-year-old hisband and father, that if she were to tell the full story no one would ever speak to her again. What is most unsettling is that Tara looks barely older than the day she vanished.

Tara's tale--slowly revealed--is either magical or delusional, dreamlike or terrifying. For Richie, who never recovered from the disgrace of suspicion, Tara's return offers the chance to regain the love of his life, although for all the longing he's felt for twenty years, a new blackness seems to overtake him with Tara's renewed presence. As those who love and missed Tara attempt to understand where she's been for two decades, they begin to ask the same question: Has Tara lost her sanity, or have they?

Award-winning author Graham Joyce masterfully explores the world that exists between dreams and reality, the known and the unknown. Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a unique journey every bit as magical as its title implies and as real and as unsentimental as the world around us.