While questioning her gender identity, a young girl is pulled between the dark world of fairylore and the dynamic world of early 20th-century scientific experimentation as she struggles to save her missing mother. The house Dorothea's great-great grandfather built on the south side of St. John's is said to lie on a fairy path, a gateway to the world of the Little Strangers. It seems to be cursed, and ever since electricity came to the island things...

During the summer of 1908, twelve-year-old Constantine Boyd is witness to an explosion of home-spun investigation--from experiments with cave-dwelling fish without eyes to scientifically bred crops to motorized bicycles and the flight of an early aeroplane. In 1920, a popular science writer and young widow tries, immediately after the bloodbath of the First World War, to explain the new theory of relativity to an audience (herself included) desperate...