Welcome to this week’s course at BookSparks University, Fairies and Fake News featuring THE COTTINGLEY SECRET by Hazel Gaynor.
THE COTTINGLEY SECRET
by Hazel Gaynor
Course Title: Fairies and Fake News
Department: Historical Fiction
Description: The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Came Home turns the clock back one hundred years to a time when two young girls from Cottingley, Yorkshire, convinced the world that they had done the impossible and photographed fairies in their garden. Now, in her newest novel, international bestseller Hazel Gaynor reimagines their story.
1917… It was inexplicable, impossible, but it had to be true—didn’t it? When two young cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright from Cottingley, England, claim to have photographed fairies at the bottom of the garden, their parents are astonished. But when one of the great novelists of the time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, becomes convinced of the photographs’ authenticity, the girls become a national sensation, their discovery offering hope to those longing for something to believe in amid a world ravaged by war. Frances and Elsie will hide their secret for many decades. But Frances longs for the truth to be told.
One hundred years later… When Olivia Kavanagh finds an old manuscript in her late grandfather’s bookshop she becomes fascinated by the story it tells of two young girls who mystified the world. But it is the discovery of an old photograph that leads her to realize how the fairy girls’ lives intertwine with hers, connecting past to present, and blurring her understanding of what is real and what is imagined. As she begins to understand why a nation once believed in fairies, can Olivia find a way to believe in herself?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hazel Gaynor’s debut novel The Girl Who Came Home—A Novel of the Titanic—was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller and was awarded the 2015 Historical Romantic Novel of the Year award by the Romantic Novelists’ Association. Her second novel A Memory of Violets, also hit the New York Times bestseller list and her third, The Girl from the Savoy was an Irish Times and Globe & Mail Canada bestseller. The book was also a finalist for the 2016 Irish Book Awards Popular Fiction Book of the Year. Hazel was also a contributing author to WWI anthology Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and the Great War. Her novels have been translated into several languages.
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