Awards
Winner of the 1997 British Fantasy Award for Best Novel
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998
Staff Pick
The Tooth Fairy is a particularly subtle literary horror novel. It is dark, erotic, filled with adolescent passions and nightmares. Joyce manages to capture the agony of unrequited love and its compensations in prose that is both freshly revealing and all too familiar. You won't ever think about the Tooth Fairy in quite the same way after you read this novel: here she is a feral, darkly erotic, willful creature. Set in the English countryside in the early sixties, The Tooth Fairy is that dreadful thing — the coming of age novel — but Joyce does not wax nostalgic. There is nothing tame and pedestrian about these characters, or what happens to them. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Sam and his friends are like any normal gang of normal young boys. Roaming wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town. Daring adults to challenge their freedom.
Until the day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bed. Not the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him, changing his life forever.
Graham Joyce grew up in the mining village of Keresley, near Coventry, in the United Kingdom. He finished a Master's degree in modern English and American literature at Leicester University, where he met his wife, Suzanne.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
From British novelist Graham Joyce comes this "eerie and quite lovely coming-of-age tale" (The Washington Post).
Sam and his friends are like any normal gang of young boys. They roam wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town, daring adults to challenge their freedom. But one day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bednot the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him. And then changes his life forever.
The Tooth Fairy is, as Jonathan Lethem wrote, a "brilliant and unclassifiable novel . . . by turns tender, nightmarish, and hilarious, with hard-won wisdom and a rare sense of time and place, of lives truly lived. I won't bother saying Graham Joyce deserves to find a wide audience in America; rather, I think the American audience deserves to discover him."
"Brilliantly original."Sunday Times (London)
"Explores the relationship between a human being and a being that may be real or may be a construct of the subconscious. This is no idealization of childhood; it is a look at the fantasies, the sins, and the rough-and-tumble of growing up."Booklist (starred review)
"An unlikely sprite assumes a sinister incarnation in this exceptional supernatural novel."Publishers Weekly
"A vivid, well-written, gripping account of a journey through childhood and adolescence, mingling the ordinary and the supernatural with a skill I greatly admire."Lisa Tuttle
"One of those near-perfect novels that grabs you from the first page and doesn't let go until the last sentence, a seamless journey through the growing pains of three young English boys."Charles de Lint
"An unforgettable story set in the strange and foreign land that is your own childhoodthat place where splendor and horror, and memory and fantasy, collide. You'll be turning the pages and wishing you could go on doing so long after the book has ended. A magnificent achievement."Karen Joy Fowler
Review
"Sharp, freshly imagined, and evocative work, by turns wrenching, funny, and disquieting." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"An eerie and quite lovely coming-of-age tale." The Washington Post
Review
"This is no idealization of childhood; it is a look at the fantasies, the sins, and the rough-and-tumble of growing up." Eric Robbins, Booklist
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"Brilliantly original." Sunday Times (London)
Review
"Joyce uses his innate understanding of childhood to great advantage, creating a story that can be taken as a supernatural tale or as a psychological study of a troubled adolescent grappling with impending adulthood." Hank Wagner, darkecho.com
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"[A] must read....The plot twists and turns, and more than a few times leads you places you don't quite expect." David Soyka, SF Site
Review
"Brilliant and unclassifiable, The Tooth Fairy is by turns tender, nightmarish, and hilarious, with hard-won wisdom and a rare sense of time and place, of loves truly lived....I won't bother saying Graham Joyce deserves to find a wide audience in America; rather, I think the American audience deserves to discover him." Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
Review
"One of those near-perfect novels that grabs you from the first page and doesn't let go until the last sentence." Charles de Lint, author of The Onion Girl
Review
"An unforgettable story set in the strange and foreign land that is your own childhood that place where splendor and horror, memory and fantasy, collide. You'll be turning the pages and wishing you could go on doing so long after the book has ended. A magnificent achievement." Karen Joy Fowler
Review
"[D]ifferent from your average coming-of-age tale, what makes the novel so anomalous is Joyce's dark and edgy style and his choice of the Tooth Fairy as a nemesis/friend/intimate companion for Sam....[A] mesmerizing story that will leave you with a new image of a childhood legend." David Hannon, Powells.com (read the entire Powells.com review)
Synopsis
Sam and his friends are like any normal gang of normal young boys. Roaming wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town. Daring adults to challenge their freedom.
Until the day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bed. Not the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him, changing his life forever.