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The Children: A Novel by Melissa Albert

from $12.80
Hardcover:

Stephen King called it an “extraordinary book. It’s a page-turner, full of mystery, but that’s the least of it. The language is dusted with magic. The Children reminded me of Ray Bradbury at his best.”

What if the fantasy world your mother built to enchant millions was also hiding the truth about what really happened to your family? The Children is a spellbinding, gothic descent into legacy, memory, and the darkness that lives inside the stories we love most.

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick, an Indie Next Pick, and a LibraryReads Top 10 Pick — The Children is also the HarperCollins Lead Read for Summer 2026 and has been recommended by the New York Times, People, Oprah Daily, and dozens more.

Rent new hardcover on Trove: $12.80 - Each rental copy can be rented for 30 days. If you love the book and decide to keep it, the remaining balance applies.

Buy new hardcover on Trove: $32.00

_________________________________________

About the book:

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods: the near-feral reality of growing up in an isolated Vermont farmhouse, and the magical adventures her mother wrote her into across a beloved, world-famous fantasy series. As the Ninth City books made Edith Sharpe a literary phenomenon, her real children were left to roam wild woods and escape a life far darker than any of her readers imagined.

Everything changes the night a fire destroys it all — leaving Edith's series unfinished and Guinevere and her brother Ennis the sole survivors of a family whose secrets have never fully surfaced. Twenty years later, Guinevere is coasting on her mother's name, midway through promoting a ghostwritten memoir, when Ennis — an artist who has long rejected his family's legacy — announces a new installation called simply, Mother.

As rumors of a death connected to his last show begin to circulate, unsettling memories from Guinevere's childhood claw their way back to the surface. Her carefully maintained public facade starts to crack, and the questions she has spent two decades running from can no longer be outpaced.

The Children is a novel about the mythic weight memory accumulates over time, and the way the books we loved as children grow up with us — sometimes into something shadowed and strange. It is literary, gothic, and deeply human, all at once.

Stephen King called it an “extraordinary book. It’s a page-turner, full of mystery, but that’s the least of it. The language is dusted with magic. The Children reminded me of Ray Bradbury at his best.”

What if the fantasy world your mother built to enchant millions was also hiding the truth about what really happened to your family? The Children is a spellbinding, gothic descent into legacy, memory, and the darkness that lives inside the stories we love most.

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick, an Indie Next Pick, and a LibraryReads Top 10 Pick — The Children is also the HarperCollins Lead Read for Summer 2026 and has been recommended by the New York Times, People, Oprah Daily, and dozens more.

Rent new hardcover on Trove: $12.80 - Each rental copy can be rented for 30 days. If you love the book and decide to keep it, the remaining balance applies.

Buy new hardcover on Trove: $32.00

_________________________________________

About the book:

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods: the near-feral reality of growing up in an isolated Vermont farmhouse, and the magical adventures her mother wrote her into across a beloved, world-famous fantasy series. As the Ninth City books made Edith Sharpe a literary phenomenon, her real children were left to roam wild woods and escape a life far darker than any of her readers imagined.

Everything changes the night a fire destroys it all — leaving Edith's series unfinished and Guinevere and her brother Ennis the sole survivors of a family whose secrets have never fully surfaced. Twenty years later, Guinevere is coasting on her mother's name, midway through promoting a ghostwritten memoir, when Ennis — an artist who has long rejected his family's legacy — announces a new installation called simply, Mother.

As rumors of a death connected to his last show begin to circulate, unsettling memories from Guinevere's childhood claw their way back to the surface. Her carefully maintained public facade starts to crack, and the questions she has spent two decades running from can no longer be outpaced.

The Children is a novel about the mythic weight memory accumulates over time, and the way the books we loved as children grow up with us — sometimes into something shadowed and strange. It is literary, gothic, and deeply human, all at once.

  • Publisher: William Morrow
    Title: The Children: A Novel
    Author: Melissa Albert
    On Sale Date: June 2, 2026
    ISBN-13: 9780063487437
    ISBN-10: 0063487438
    Format: Hardcover
    Retail Price: $32.00 USD
    BISAC: Fiction / Gothic
    Page Count: 416
    Dimensions: 9 in H | 6 in W | 1.2 in T
    Weight: 1.2 lb

  • Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of The Bad Ones, Our Crooked Hearts, and the acclaimed Hazel Wood series, which has been translated into more than twenty languages and recognized on the New York Times list of Notable Children's Books. She has twice been selected as a #1 Indie Next Pick and is a former indie bookseller and managing editor at Barnes & Noble. The Children is her first adult novel, acquired in an 11-way US auction and simultaneously published in the UK by Bloomsbury.

    Albert's move into adult fiction marks a major new chapter in an already celebrated career. She has a second adult novel already under contract, signaling a full and intentional shift into the adult literary space. With a devoted readership, deep connections across the book world, and blurbs that include Stephen King — who called the book extraordinary and compared it to Ray Bradbury at his best — Albert arrives in the adult market with considerable force.

  • Pre-release readers are calling it haunting, spellbinding, and unforgettable:

    • Early readers describe The Children as a breathtaking and beautiful feat of storytelling — the kind of book that makes the real world fall away in the final chapters and then refuses to leave your heart.

    • Booksellers are comparing Albert to Daphne du Maurier, Kelly Link, and Victor LaValle, calling her writing essentially impossible to describe and absolutely impossible to put down.

    • Pre-release readers are praising its intricately woven structure, describing the novel as a tapestry that rewards both the sweep of the whole and the patience to linger in its finely crafted details.

    • Advance readers are calling it one of the most atmospherically rich reading experiences in recent memory — eerie, gorgeous, and shot through with a dread that builds slowly and pays off completely.

This book is for you if:

  • You want a novel that is, all at once, literary fiction, horror, fairy tale, and family drama.

  • You are drawn to gothic, atmospheric fiction where the line between magic and reality blurs in ways that feel genuinely unsettling.

  • You are fascinated by the complicated, layered dynamics of siblings, mothers, and the families that shape — and sometimes wound — us.

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