Melissa Albert

Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice's life on the road, always a step ahead of the strange bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice's grandmother, the reclusive author of a book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate - the Hazel Wood - Alice learns how bad her luck can really get. Her mother is stolen away - by a figure who claims to come from the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother's stories are set. Alice's only lead is the message her mother left behind: STAY AWAY FROM THE HAZEL WOOD.

To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother's tales began...

Book 1 in the Hazel Wood series.

Alice has fought hard for a normal life. Having escaped the Hinterland - the strange, pitch-dark fairy tale world she was born into - she has washed up in New York City, determined to build a new future for herself.

But when her fellow survivors start being brutally murdered, Alice must face the fact that the Hinterland cannot be so easily escaped, and that, from the shadows of her past, something - or someone - is coming for her . . .

Ivy's summer kicks off with a series of disturbing events. As unnatural offerings appear on her doorstep, she's haunted by fragmented memories from her childhood, suggesting there's more to her mother, Dana, than meets the eye. Dana's tale starts the year she turns sixteen, when she embarks on a major fling with the supernatural. Too late she realizes that the powers she's playing with are also playing with her. Years after it began, Ivy and Dana's shared story will come down to a reckoning between a mother, a daughter and the dark forces they never should have messed with.