The Changeling of Finnistuath: A Novel

kate horsley

Here, the author of the acclaimed Confessions of a Pagan Nun takes us to fourteenth-century Ireland for a strange and luminous tale of the elusive nature of identity and of triumph in adversity. The Changeling of Finnistuath is the story of Grey, a peasant girl who is raised as a boy, and who, until adolescence, never doubts herself to be male. The revelation of her womanhood marks the beginning of her journey—including son, whore, warrior, and mother—each of which brings its own special wisdom, but none of which, she discovers, can ultimately define her. In the course of her adventurous life, Grey deals with all the challenges of her tumultuous age—from political oppression to corrupt Church hierarchy to the horrors of the Black Death—ultimately finding peace and a kind of redemption by embracing the beautifully impermanent quality of identity that her unusual life has enabled her to understand.

Genres historical fictionfictionfantasyirelandhistorical14th centurybook clubmedievalliterary fictionirish literature

304 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30,2003

This edition

Format: 304 pages, Hardcover
Published: December 30, 2003 by Shambhala
ISBN: 9781590300480
ASIN: 1590300483
Language: English

About the author

kate horsley

Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1952, Kate Horsley Parker, the youngest of five children, loved to read. Her mother, Alice Horsley Parker, inspired that love, which is part of the reason that she chose to write under her mother's maiden name. In her mother's world, young women were to be educated and refined and passionate. While in a private girl's school in Virginia during the sixties, Horsley protested against the Vietnam War and worked in the Civil Rights movement. And then she went off to college and off to Paris for summer school. Every event in life was marked by a book, an almost prophetic glimpse into what would become a passion. After reading a book by Alan Watts, Horsley's flirtation with Zen Buddhism became a lifelong fling. Flying to Paris, she read Black Elk Speaks, one of several works on or by Native Americans that inspired her to move to the West. It was her Masters Thesis work on Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Silko that propelled her to travel to New Mexico where she has lived since 1977. She got a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. The research she did on women in the American West inspired her to make novels out of the dimly known but awesome lives of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Horsley has been teaching college English in New Mexico for over twenty years and is involved in hospice work.

Horsley dedicated her first published novel to her mother, and the other five to her son Aaron, who died at the age of eighteen in 2000.