Catherynne M Valente's latest novel begins in the vast garden of a Sultan's palace and with a girl who has been banished from the palace into the garden because of a peculiar marking: her eyelids and the skin around her eyes are stained black.  When a plucky boy approaches her, she tells him that the markings are stories written in tiny handwriting; and at his request she begins to tell him the first story, from the crease of her left eyelid.  These stories are the focus of the book, although there is an important subplot of the boy getting in trouble for his growing association with the girl.

The stories she tells have a fairytale, mythical quality about them; there are stories within stories within stories, weaving in and out of each other; and it is all told in Valente's flowing, beautiful prose.  She takes some basic archetypes - the prince, the maiden and the witch, for instance - and turns them on their head in an oft-peculiar way, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, with ideas drawn from a wide spread of cultures and a fair few, I suspect, from her own head. 

This is a dazzling original, interesting book, and I recommend it to everyone who wants a taste of something fresh and fantastic.

It's currently available in the US and Canada, and for those beyond those shores it's available online.

To give you a taster of the book, you can read the following excerpts:
The Prelude
The Beginning of the Orphan's Tales

And here are two of her short stories, available online:
Bones Like Black Sugar
The Maiden-Tree

Cross posted to: alankria __fantasynovel   fantasywithbite   scifantasybooks  writer_girls