The Pelican Child

Author: Joy Williams

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) | Short stories

Published on 4^th December 2025 by Profile Books Ltd (Tuskar Rock) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 176 pages
129mm x 198mm x 14mm | 162g

Lauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.