From the author of The Cassandra (“Quirky, funny, dark,” Margaret Atwood), a historical reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s life and a love letter to storytelling as an act of survival

In the early nineteenth century, a boy named Hans lives in poverty in Odense, Denmark, where he and his father escape to a world of their own making through the magic of storytelling by reading stories and plays aloud in their small home. After the death of his beloved father, Hans flees to Copenhagen, where he can finally pursue his dreams. His first taste of success, though, is bittersweet; heartbreak inspires him to write a forlorn fairy tale called “The Little Mermaid,” a story of unrequited love that changes the course of his life.

By 1856, Hans is an internationally renowned storyteller and receives an invitation to visit Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, in England. Catherine, an aggrieved mother of ten children, is navigating a humiliating betrayal by her husband when she forms an unlikely friendship with her unruly houseguest, a fellow outsider in Victorian society whose desire for unconditional love appears just out of reach. Years later, as Hans wrestles with acceptance and mortality, reflecting on his own rise from an impoverished upbringing to literary stardom, the characters from his own fairy tales start to come to feverish life.

A rich retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s life and literary lineage, Duckling is a testament to how imagination endures even after the story has ended.