The Twelfth Fairy (Old Stories Told Anew)

Let us have a fair hearing at last for the Twelfth Fairy who has for so long been unjustly libelled with sending the Sleeping Beauty to oblivion on her sixteenth birthday. The Lady Melicia never denied that she played a part in this unhappy affair but, in her defence, has a question for her accusers: Do you really believe in fairies? This retelling of a classic fairy tale is set in a land with twelve fairies who confer miraculous gifts as proofs of God’s existence. All twelve are called on to provide their gifts to the newborn princess of the realm. Things go wrong when one of the twelve declares that fairy gifts are nonsense.

Jake van der Kamp is a Hong Kong-based financial journalist and novelist whose fiction on the theme of ‘old stories told anew’ explores organised religion, social dilemmas stemming from the rapid pace of technological change and the likely ordering of society in the Space Age of the future.