Seventeen-year-old alice and her mother have spent most of alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the hazel wood, alice learns how bad her luck can really get: her mother is stolen away―by a figure who claims to come from the hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother’s stories are set. Alice’s only lead is the message her mother left behind: “stay away from the hazel wood.”