The Hazel Wood

The Hazel Wood is a young adult fantasy novel by Melissa Albert, first published in 2017. It is built around a book of dark fairy tales that turns out to be more than a book.

Alice has grown up on the move with her mother, never staying anywhere long enough to unpack, because something has always seemed to be following them. Her grandmother wrote a famous and now scarce collection of dark fairy tales and died alone on her country estate, and Alice has never read it. When her mother is taken by a figure who belongs in those stories, Alice sets out with Ellery Finch, a rich boy who has read the tales obsessively and knows far too much about the Hinterland, to find the place the stories came from and bring her mother home.

The novel mixes a contemporary road story with the unforgiving logic of fairy tales, so the further the two of them travel the less ordinary the world becomes. It is the first of two books set around the Hinterland, and it treats stories as places with rules that can be broken.