Cuckoo Song

Read this thought-provoking, critically acclaimed novel from Frances Hardinge, winner of the Costa Book of the Year and Costa Children's Book Awards for The Lie Tree. When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry, her sister seems scared of her, and her parents whisper behind closed doors. She looks through her diary to try to remember, but the pages have been ripped out. Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest to find the truth she must travel into the terrifying underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family—before it’s too late … Set in England after World War I, this is a brilliantly creepy but ultimately loving story of the relationship between two sisters who have to band together against a world where nothing is as it seems.

407 printed pages

Original publication: 2015
Publication year: 2015
Publishers: Amulet Books, ABRAMS, Inc.

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Quotes

Eugeniahas quoted2 years ago
What happens to the outsiders? Are we like windfalls, rotting when we fall off the main tree?

‘We’re like ghosts,’ she said aloud, feeling sad. ‘The real world goes on – jobs and families and newspaper stories – and we’re outside it.’

‘No, we’re not,’ said Violet, with surly defiance. ‘They’re the ghosts. Piers and Celeste and the others like them. Trying to cling to the past, to the way things were, pretending nothing has changed. Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be.’
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Eugeniahas quoted2 years ago
Trista never tired of hearing them. Clocks fascinated her now, the way they ticked and told the hours without her dying. Suns that set and rose again, without a countdown. Mornings without the whispers and snickers of mortality
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Eugeniahas quoted2 years ago
Everything she had was borrowed, just as the Grimmer had said in her dream. She was litter and leavings, not a person in her own right.

‘But I am a person!’ she wailed, the room throwing back derisive echoes. ‘I’m real! I am! I’ve got a name!’
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