Changes

|title=Gretel and the Dark

|author=Eliza Granville

|publisher=Hamish Hamilton

|date=January 2014

|video=-YbyxtdOvZo

|summary=Two linked tales of girls in different corners of Europe in different corners of the 20th century. It’s not perfect but it has so much ambition in its pages it does come up trumps in the end.

}}

Josef Breuer has never had a case such as this. For a doctor in fin-de-siecle Vienna, spurned by his ex-colleague Sigmund, and with some dark happenings in his marriage and his past, he gets as a patient a young, damaged girl, found naked and battered outside an asylum. She claims she has never come from there, however, and that she is of no father or mother besides a purpose. She says she is a machine, an automaton, a beautiful kind of golem, with the task of going to Linz and killing a monster. She has an unusual number design at her wrist. This story alternates with that of another young girl, a very impetuous and belligerent child, now that her favourite nanny-come-nurse-come-cook-come-storyteller has been drummed out, and living alone with her father, again a doctor, outside a zoo. But a zoo that doesn't strictly hold animals, nor allows for their conservation…