Cuckoo Song

Cuckoo Song is a children's or young adult fantasy novel by the English writer Frances Hardinge, published in 2014. It won the Robert Holdstock Award for best fantasy novel in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

The story takes place in the early 1920s, a few years after the First World War, and is mainly set in the imaginary English city of Ellchester, which stands beside an estuary, is hilly and has a great many bridges.

Triss has been unwell since she was rescued from the Grimmer, a pond near the family's holiday cottage, and her memory of it is hazy. She sees her dolls coming alive, she has a gargantuan appetite and an urge to eat her possessions as well as her food, she finds dead leaves in her hair, and her tears are spiderweb. Her sister Pen hates her with a vengeance. The city has a fairy underworld called the Underbelly, peopled by forgotten fairy beings known as the Besiders, which the Architect built as a new home for them now that hidden places in the countryside are becoming rare.