Enter the world of The Wild Mother

Modern fairytale, bold biblical midrash, filled with the psychological depth and imaginative originality for which the author of The Maeve Chronicles is known. Elizabeth Cunningham's classic feminist novel is as fresh and timeless today as when it was first released in 1993 to critical acclaim.

Story Overview

Adam Underwood and Eva Brooke appear to be made for each other. Both are single parents. Both are academics, he a dazzling, enigmatic professor of Alchemy, she a humble but dedicated professor of Fairytales. Adam's children, Ionia and Fred, share a latchkey after school with Eva's precocious son, Jason. So why don't Adam and Eva marry and live happily ever after?

Inner Struggles

Eva can't help wondering. Pathologically polite, she cannot bring herself to ask personal questions. She struggles not to find it strange that Adam has never so much as mentioned his children's absent mother. Nor has Adam's own mother-cum-housekeeper, the feisty, outspoken Ursula, ever uttered her name. Yet Eva glimpses the missing woman in ten-year-old Ionia's haunted and haunting purple eyes and in Ionia's drawings of a woman dancing on the crest of a hill, wild black hair spread out against the sky....

The Return of Lilith

Then one night, she returns: Lilith, the wild mother. The precarious status quo that Eva, Adam, and their families have achieved is shattered and their world is turned inside out or, more precisely, outside in.

Conflict and Choice

As wild breaks into their lives, Adam, obsessed with control, attempts to seal them all in a deadly trap. Now a crucial challenge confronts each one of them. Will these very human beings embrace their own wildness, risking all they value and understand? Or will they deny the freedom essential to Lilith's nature--and their own.