The Faery Handbag

In The Faery Handbag, Kelly Link invites readers into a world where the ordinary and the impossible rest uneasily side by side. Genevieve grows up in the orbit of her grandmother Zofia, whose stories—of a vanished country, of long-remembered histories, of fantastic creatures contained within a vast handbag—hover between affectionate eccentricity and unsettling truth. It is a story about the ways we carry the past with us: in objects, in memory, in the echo of voices we thought we’d lost. It draws readers into a world that is at once playful and poignant, where the rules of reality bend and the heart’s deepest longings ripple with enchantment. Playful and piercing in equal measure, the story asks what it costs to doubt the stories we are given—and what it costs to believe them.