The Night Country - (Hazel Wood) by Melissa Albert

Book Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling sequel to Melissa Albert's beloved The Hazel Wood!

In The Night Country, Alice Proserpine dives back into a menacing, mesmerizing world of dark fairy tales and hidden doors. Follow her and Ellery Finch as they learn The Hazel Wood was just the beginning, and that worlds die not with a whimper, but a bang.

With Finch's help, Alice escaped the Hinterland and her reclusive grandmother's dark legacy. Now she and the rest of the dregs of the fairy tale world have washed up in New York City, where Alice is trying to make a new, unmagical life. But something is stalking the Hinterland's survivors--and she suspects their deaths may have a darker purpose. Meanwhile, in the winking out world of the Hinterland, Finch seeks his own adventure, and--if he can find it--a way back home...

Review Quotes

A New York Times bestseller

"A charming, mysterious fable that unpacks what it means to be a story and whether we are all simply the stories we hear and tell." --Cassandra Clare, author of the Mortal Instruments series

"What Albert renders on the page is audacious: with resounding success, she keeps a firm grip on her characters and their stories, and her prose weaves a magic of its own, animating the ever-expanding fantastical premise through lyrical language, striking metaphor, and a mastery of tone that forces readers to feel the magic along with the underlying emotional stakes." --Booklist, starred review

"This fairy tale noir adventure blends romance and mystery with plenty of action...a must-read for fans of portal fantasies, mysteries, and readers who prefer their magic with bloody sharp edges." --School Library Journal, starred review

"Albert's legion of fans will relish her return to the bloody, terrifying, seductive world of her debut and the inventive brilliance of her storytelling." --The Guardian

"Rife with long-forgotten ghosts, unforgettable tales of fancy, and even a touch of romance, Albert shines in her sophomore novel, pulling the reader once more into the haunting depths of the Hinterland, where Stories rule, whether they know it or not." --Paperback Paris

Praise for The Hazel Wood

New York Times bestseller
Seven starred reviews
#1 Indie Next Pick
Junior Library Guild Selection
ALA's Best Fiction for Young Adults List
Publishers Weekly Flying Start

"The Hazel Wood starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth, and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a good book. It's a captivating debut." --The New York Times Book Review, 2018 Notable Children's Book

"An original and imaginative fairy tale: thrilling, fascinating, and poignant in equal measure." --Entertainment Weekly, Best YA Book of the Year

"Insidiously beautiful, this is the opposite of escapist fantasy; it is a story about the imagination's power to loose atrocity into the (mostly) law-abiding confines of the real." --The Guardian, Best Children's Book of the Year

"A darkly brilliant story of literary obsession, fairy-tale malignancy, and the measures a mother will take to spare her child." --The Wall Street Journal, Best Children's Book of the Year

"This extremely creepy, wondrously original and beautifully written book conjures up a dark, bloody netherworld of fairy tales and enchants and enthralls from the first sentence to the final page." --The Buffalo News

About the Author