Cuckoo's Song

«Cuckoo's Song» — the third book by Frances Harding, published by Clever.

The plot of the book is based on ancient Celtic myths about changelings. According to legend, changelings are beings left by dark powers to parents in place of stolen... human children.

The protagonist of the book is a girl named Teresa (Triss). She has a mom, dad, and sister Penelope. It seems like a perfect family, a seemingly perfect home... Everything seems fine, until one day Triss wakes up and feels that she is «not herself». Her head feels like it's made of cotton, she is constantly hungry, her sister looks at her with hatred and calls her «fake», dolls and mannequins talk to her... Her parents try to explain the oddities as just a common fever. But Triss understands that it is not so simple. Has she gone crazy? Or is she truly fake? One day she overhears a conversation that reveals that the «real» Teresa has been abducted, and she is just a substitute doll made of twigs, leaves, and the diaries of the abducted Triss. Changelings can live only 7 days, and what happens then? Death? Teresa needs to find out to save herself.

Mysticism, fantasy, thriller, detective story — all of this is in the book. But there is also an ordinary family with familiar problems, there are sisters fighting for their parents' attention, there are a mom and dad who refuse to understand their children and believe that the main thing is to keep their daughters from going anywhere. There are problems and sorrows familiar to everyone.


— We are like ghosts. The real world goes by: work, family, stories in the newspapers, and we watch from the outside. -No. They are the ghosts. Clinging to the past, pretending that nothing has happened. Everything changes, breaks, parts stop fitting together — and we know this despite our stopped clocks. The world collapses, changes, and dances. It is always in motion. That's how it is. That's how it should be.