Fire and Hemlock was published by Greenwillow Books in 1985. The novel opens with nineteen-year-old Polly Whittacker packing for university and suddenly realizing that she has two sets of memories — one ordinary and one extraordinary. The extraordinary memories involve Thomas Lynn, a cellist she met when she was ten, with whom she developed an intense friendship involving shared storytelling, invented heroes, and gradually darkening encounters with the sinister Laurel Perry (Laurel = fairy queen).
The novel works on multiple levels simultaneously. On the surface, it is a realistic story about a girl growing up in a broken home who finds solace in an older man’s intellectual companionship. Beneath that, it is a retelling of the ballad of Tam Lin — in which a mortal man is pledged to the fairy queen as a sacrifice and can only be saved by a woman who holds onto him through terrifying transformations. Beneath that, it is a meditation on how stories work: Polly and Tom create stories together, and those stories begin to come true in ways neither intended.
Jones never makes the fantasy layer entirely explicit. The reader, like Polly, must piece together what is really happening from fragments, clues, and the unreliability of memory itself. The novel rewards — indeed, demands — rereading; meanings that are invisible on first encounter become clear on second or third reading.
The book is widely considered Jones’s masterpiece among adult readers and critics, though it is less commercially successful than Howl’s Moving Castle. Its complexity, emotional intensity, and refusal to simplify make it one of the most intellectually demanding works of fantasy published in the twentieth century.
Collecting Fire and Hemlock
First edition (Greenwillow Books, New York, 1985): Hardcover, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good/very good: $60–$150
- UK first (Methuen, 1985): $100–$300