The Toymakers: Dark, enchanting and utterly gripping'

by Robert Dinsdale

‘Whenever you feel that way about your mother, about your father, I want you to take this and remember: there was your own first frost, once. They’d have taken you to the step and showed it you, sparkling in the night. And there was a first set of clothes, a first birthday, a first present wrapped in ribbon that you couldn’t quite unwrap yourself. Let it take you back there. You don’t have to do anything, you never have to speak to them again if that’s what you choose – just so long as you remember.’ Cathy took the ballerina, let it twirl around her palm and thought she knew what Papa Jack meant – for on the edges of her vision, she could see her old bedroom again, all of it reconstituted and only just out of reach. This was what had saved him, she remembered – this was the very same magic that had worked itself on Chichikov, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, all of the rest. She looked at him now and tried to picture how his life had been, in those places at the ends of the earth, bartering for his life with enchanted creations of dead grass and bark. What was it Kaspar had said? A toy cannot save a life, but it can save a soul.