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  • The Stolen Child

  • This unique urban fantasy, inspired by W.B. Yeats poem of the same name, tells the lore of the changeling from two points of view: the child transforming into a changeling and the changeling transforming back to a human. Both characters have quite a lot in common, both appear to be the last of thei ... Continue

    This unique urban fantasy, inspired by W.B. Yeats poem of the same name, tells the lore of the changeling from two points of view: the child transforming into a changeling and the changeling transforming back to a human. Both characters have quite a lot in common, both appear to be the last of their kind and both are uncommonly interested in their past, dimly-remembered lives.

    

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Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand

Inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, THE STOLEN CHILD is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child Henry Day and his double.

On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home and hides in a hollow tree. There he is taken by the changelings—an unaging tribe of wild children who live in darkness and in secret. They spirit him away, name him Aniday, and make him one of their own. Stuck forever as a child, Aniday grows in spirit, struggling to remember the life and family he left behind. He also seeks to understand and fit in this shadow land, as modern life encroaches upon both myth and nature.

In his place, the changelings leave a double, a boy who steals Henry’s life in the world. This new Henry Day must adjust to a modern culture while hiding his true identity from the Day family. But he can’t hide his extraordinary talent for the piano (a skill the true Henry never displayed), and his dazzling performances prompt his father to suspect that the son he has raised is an imposter. As he ages the new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent memories of life in another time and place, of a German piano teacher and his prodigy. Of a time when he, too, had been a stolen child. Both Henry and Aniday obsessively search for who they once were before they changed places in the world.

The Stolen Child is a classic tale of leaving childhood and the search for identity. With just the right mix of fantasy and realism, Keith Donohue has created a bedtime story for adults and a literary fable of remarkable depth and strange delights.

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