"The war did not bring the Faeries back to England. As boys languished in the trenches, they still spoke in hushed 'what ifs' until all hope ran out. The belief in magic was replaced by the reality of mustard gas." These opening lines set Moorea Corrigan's Thistlemarsh squarely in a 1919 England at once recognizable and entirely foreign, imagining a moment in history marked as much by Faerie magic--and its sudden disappearance--as by the brutalities of World War I.

Against this backdrop, a young woman named Mouse is summoned back to her uncle's estate upon his death, where she is issued both an inheritance and a challenge: Thistlemarsh Hall, a Faerie-blessed and once-esteemed manor house in the English countryside since fallen into disrepair, and a requirement to fully restore it within a month in order to secure her inheritance and the title of Lady Dewhurst. While she cares not a whit for the house or title, the bequest includes enough income to keep her brother, gravely injured at the front and with no remembrance of her, in good care for the rest of his days--and that's all the motivation the scrappy Mouse needs to try everything in her power to secure the inheritance. The task--set by her "cold, cruel, and unfeeling" uncle both to punish Mouse and to subvert the laws requiring a Faerie-blessed house like Thistlemarsh to be passed down to the nearest living heir--is daunting. Perhaps even impossible: Thistlemarsh "teetered on the brink of extinction, its bones set back against withered grounds.... It was as though the Hall was sinking into the earth." Mouse was a nurse in the war, not a carpenter, upholsterer, builder, or craftsman, and with her brother lost to the war, she's left alone to face the task set by her uncaring relative. But when a Faerie lord named Thornwood makes an unexpected appearance in her garden--the first Faerie appearance in more than a century--Mouse sees a possibility of success.

Once a student of Faerie anthropology, Mouse is well aware of the longstanding "sense of distrust" between Fae and human. While she--like so many others--had once hoped Faeries would return during the war to support their English compatriots, that hope has long since been dashed. Faeries are known to be tricksters, incapable of lying outright but fully able to deceive by omission, assumption, elision. One must never tell a faerie one's name. And "lastly, and most important of all, never trust a Faerie completely."

Despite every warning in Faerie lore, even in the books of Faerie history passed down from her late mother, Mouse agrees to bargain with Thornwood. When the house seems to push back against Thornwood's magic, however, the two are forced to work ever more closely together to accomplish their goal of restoration (and inheritance). But at what cost? How much is Mouse willing to sacrifice for success, and how entangled is Thornwood within that?

In Thistlemarsh, Corrigan has crafted a singular novel, parts cozy, Fae-inspired fever dream, enemies-to-lovers romance, historical fiction, fantasy. These elements combine to great effect: the bits of the story that feel foreseeable are reminiscent of the best cozy mysteries, with leads chasing down seemingly disparate clues only to find they are all important details, while elements of fantasy and magic keep the novel from ever falling into predictability. A series of tasks challenge Mouse and her fairy lord to untangle the magic in the hall, drawing on the best of trials in literature. And while history books don't often recall a time "when the road between the mortal world and Faerie was still clear," Corrigan draws deeply on accounts of World War I injuries to paint a picture of the cruel toll of war. Mouse toils away in a postwar hospital, where the "rush of triage work had slowed into the painful languidness of chronic care... [in a ward with] the dust of dashed dreams poisoning the air."

Corrigan sets the magic of Thistlemarsh in a world both familiar and firmly rooted in history, accomplishing a kind of fantastical worldbuilding that allows for easy entry, yet never feels oversimplified. The rules of Faerie magic here draw on common fairy tales, myths, and lore that span centuries, yet Corrigan has made this magic, and Mouse's quest to untangle it, entirely her own. "Magic is a conversation," Thornwood tells Mouse--a dialogue of wants and needs, haves and have nots, demands and expectations, and above all, power. With a sense of place so vivid that Thistlemarsh Hall often feels like a character unto itself, Thistlemarsh is an invitation to a world both old and new, imagining the story of a scrappy, fierce young woman determined to make--and claim--a place for herself and those she loves, no matter the cost. --Kerry McHugh

Moorea Corrigan (photo: John Bosley)

Moorea Corrigan holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She lives and works in Colorado. Corrigan's debut novel for adults, Thistlemarsh (Berkley, April 21, 2026), set in the aftermath of World War I, imagines a crumbling, magic-cursed manor house inherited by a woman so desperate to restore it that she makes an ill-advised bargain with a Faerie lord.

Tell us a bit about Thistlemarsh.

The brief one-sentence summary is that it's about a girl, who is a nurse from World War I, returning home after a terrible time on the front. She's been bequeathed her childhood home by her uncle, but there are tons of caveats, and if she can't fulfill those caveats by the end of the month, the house goes to her mortal enemy. So she makes a deal with a faerie, but there are consequences for those deals, and ramifications that she really can't anticipate.

I hope that's it's enchanting, that it's folkloric. I hope that it's very whimsical, but not so whimsical to overlook the element of darkness in the fairies. It's not necessarily a Tinkerbell fairy, this is more traditional, like Celtic folkloric fairies. I also associate the novel with spring; there's a lot of rejuvenation and rebirth, and there's a theme of gardening in it. There is romance, a little bit, and fun creatures throughout that were fun to research and fun to write.

It's historical fiction, it's romance, it's fantasy, it's dark, it's funny, it's light--it's a little bit of all the things.

Yes, kind of everything. My personal description for it is something like Labyrinth, something Jim Henson-y meets period drama. A fantasy period drama. Sort of a Downton Abbey vibe, but with the three stages of a trial.

What made you think to combine the historical fiction and the fantastical fiction the way you did?

I love them both, and I'm interested in that overlap of origins and the truth and the tale, although it doesn't have to be the only truth. And that specific time in British history, after World War I, was really the dissolution of the manor house. All these men had died, and death taxes were so high that many families couldn't afford to keep up the houses. So this idea that I had of something happening fantastically also fit in historically with what was happening at that time.

That feels true of Mouse's cousin and brother, who are both talked about a lot on the page but don't actually appear in the book itself. As I was researching, it really struck me how that loss was like a cannon blast in the middle of society, a hole where all of the men who had died once were, and where they should have been in the narrative. Their absence is heavy and can be felt, because it would have been felt by the characters in the book.

And Mouse only inherits because they are gone. Except her brother is still alive, just incapable of inheriting, so that's another wound. In a fairy tale, maybe he would have been restored to who he was, but in real life, it's important to know that not everyone gets fully restored, and that's okay, and they can still live full lives even if it's not the life they might have had. So in this setting and this time, there are faeries, but there's also real-world problems.

For the historical elements, how did you set about your research into World War I history?

The Fae stuff was more like unconscious research, because I consume so much of that media anyway. The World War I topics were more intense research. There's a great podcast called "Not So Quiet on the Western Front," and it goes into incredible detail on different aspects of the war. At first, I planned to set the book during the war, so I did loads of research on trench warfare and weapons, zeppelins and bombing raids. It really challenged my thinking about World War I; there were not that many bombing raids, and the Germans didn't have tanks! Then I turned to more of the home front history. I watched an episode of Mavericks on YouTube, where they talked about women nurses during the war, and even that wasn't all that common at first, becoming more allowable later in the war. And, after a time, the British army stopped bringing home the bodies of dead soldiers. All of those soldiers' bodies are buried out there. That created this kind of national trauma that you can still feel in the U.K. today; every village has a WWI monument.

That was all kind of dark, and then there were times when I was like, okay, I've got to go do some fantasy research, because these statistics are so depressing.

That reminds me of the missing father in A Little Princess.

I grew up reading A Little Princess. And then I read The Secret Garden right as I was starting to write this book, and that very much influenced the shape of Thistlemarsh, particularly in Mouse's relationship with her brother and cousin.

When you needed a break from the more bleak historical research around the war, what did you look to? Fairy tales and lore?

I went to school in the U.K. I was in Edinburgh for four years, and there was so much of that just in the daily world there, just in the town, a lot of heraldry. And I've always been interested in fantasy stuff. I grew up reading Diana Wynne Jones, that kind of thing. In high school, I got really into fairy lore and any kind of fairy tale, and that interest continued into adulthood. I listen to a lot of folklore podcasts, like "Grim Reaping," where they give historical and political background on Grimm's Fairy Tales. And then "Three Ravens" podcast, which goes over the folklore of each county in England. Fairies in particular interest me when they get to the more mischievous side of the stories. My favorite tale as a kid was Rumpelstiltskin, and I love the movie Labyrinth and the novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and many of Robin McKinley's books, where fairies may even be trying to be helpful, but they often mess up. There's a twist in the tale, and that's what's interesting to me, a twist on what we think we know. --Kerry McHugh