If you can’t see it … is it real?






“What does real mean? Is love real? Or magic, or hope, or joy, or the quest for enlightenment? Are any of those things less real just because they’re woven in words?… Fairy stories matter. They’re how we understand what’s true.”



Joanne Harris is serenely unconcerned with the subdivisions of literary genre. Her new book is, yes, a fairytale, but one that breaks through into the real world, the world of the Sightless Folk – as the fairy Folk call us. The war between the Daylight Folk and the Midnight Folk is waged, as it were, in the negatives rather than in the prints.



And that’s where Tom Argent finds them. He is a photographer, and he notices that people and things show up on his negatives which he never saw while he was taking the pictures.



Tom Argent falls for the sheer glamour of one of the Daylight Folk, but he is warned to forget her forever: the alternative is True Love and Certain Death. “Love is not a partnership”, she tells him, “It is a hunting ground, where only the strongest can survive.” So The Moonlight Market is a love story – more than one, really. But not necessarily the love story that Tom thinks it is.



Joanne Harris – Gollancz: Hardback £22.00, Paperback £9.99