Read Melissa Albert’s ‘The Children’ Excerpt

Being a Melissa Albert fan has always come with incredible twists and turns across the many pages she’s writen, but the author’s next book takes everything to the another level. It feels like magic how the novel has been everywhere. From multiple starred reviews to raves from readers who got to experience the novel in some pretty surprising ways (including a retreat that even made me jealous). It’s this kind of buzz that feels like lightning in a bottle—the moment before you know that a book is going to be everywhere. And while Melissa Albert has already been the name behind so many of our favorite reads, this time she’ll absolutely take over.

Cosmopolitan has an exclusive look at Melissa Albert’s The Children, which is set to be released on June 2, 2026 from our friends at William Morrow. But don’t just take it from us, hear about it from the incredible author herself:

“The Children is a dual timeline novel centering on Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe, the estranged adult children of a legendary fantasy novelist. Their mother made them famous as the protagonists of her beloved Ninth City books, envied by readers around the world—until she and their father die under tragic circumstances, leaving the children orphaned and the book series unfinished,” Melissa Albert said.

And now you get to dive right in with an incredible excerpt that will leave you absolutely breathless.

“In the present day, Guinevere has just released a ghostwritten memoir about their idyllic childhood. Then Ennis, now an infamous installation artist, announces he'll be opening a new show titled Mother, which she fears will reveal a very different narrative,” Melissa continued. “The second timeline tells the true story of their childhood together, left to run wild in a strange house deep in the Vermont woods, marked with mysterious traces of past inhabitants and containing one particularly unfriendly room. In this excerpt the siblings have just woken up after the family's first night in the house—a refuge following their parents' slide into financial precarity—and are setting out together to explore it.”

Keep on reading to find out the truth for yourself, but don’t forget to pre-order The Children so you can see it all unfold.

The house was as good as a country for exploration: three stories high, plus an attic. Its walls ranged in color from flax to chocolate and gave the effect of being inside a cigar box. As the sun climbed the air sweetened, light moving like a cat’s paw through the warbled window glass.

The rooms were fully furnished, everything made of wood and immovably heavy. Guinevere loved all of it: the chair with clawed lion’s feet, the folding screen so finely worked the wood looked like filigree. She started to count the carved bees hidden in the bedposts and window ledges and walls, and stopped when she hit thirty. It seemed impossible that this house had sat so long without a family inside it.

Except for one room. On the third floor, behind the last door they opened, not counting the attic hatch. A long room lined with seven windows, looking down over the orchard and the woods beyond.

It was emptier than the others, nothing inside it but a big wooden desk peppered eccentrically with drawers. Guinevere crossed the room to look closer. On each drawer was a little hand-shaped pull, cupped or closed or pointing or splayed, all cast in a gold-colored metal.

The desk looked like something a witch had made. Possibly from the body parts of her neighbors. She touched her own index finger to a tiny tarnished one. Who would want a desk like this?

Ennis yanked at a gold fist. The drawer made a rattling sound and didn’t open. He said, “I don’t like this room.”

She didn’t, either. It was warmer than the hall, and so quiet you felt it like an earache. One of the seven windows was open. Guinevere could see trees outside, moving in the wind. None of that coolness washed into the room.

Her left eye popped with fractured colors, like she was blinking away something bright. “Let’s go,” she said, and tugged Ennis back to the hall.

Now the attic. She had to climb onto her brother’s shoulders to reach the pull that brought the ladder down. She tested the first rung with one bare foot. Then climbed it, hand over hand, into a room that ran the length of the house.

The attic had a low peaked ceiling and slanted windows through which a blueness flowed. Ennis ran straight to the wooden racks on the southern wall, hung with guns of all sizes. By the next day Llewellyn would discover the cache himself and hide it away. But the children found it first. They lifted the old artillery in reverent hands, sighting down tarnished barrels.

“We’ll build a lookout station,” Ennis said, “and store our guns up there. So we can keep watch over the woods.”

Guinevere nodded. It was a good plan. “What are we watching for?”

“Pirates,” he said definitely.

When they tired of weaponry they moved to the banded chests lined up along the eastern wall. One was stacked with quilts, dusted with pale gray particles that might have been lavender. The quilts were patterned with fruit and honeybees and leaping rabbits, their colors barely faded. Another chest smelled of vinegar and vanilla and was full of books. Guinevere picked through the words on a cover.

T-he, The. The Per, Pearls. Perils? The Perils—She shook her head and dropped it back onto the stack.

In another chest was a jumble of boots, and lain over the top a pair of women’s gloves, folded. Guinevere squinted at the left one, picked it up, and stuck her hand in as far as it would go. Not far. The glove had no ring finger, just a smooth gap beside the pinkie. Her third finger folded beneath it like a wing. She admired the effect for a moment, then peeled off the glove and tossed it back.

The boots must’ve been put away muddy, long ago. The mud had dried and fallen into a sediment layer over the chest’s bottom. Adrift in the dirt was a rattling box of shotgun shells, red and gold like little Christmas crackers. She picked one up, touched her tongue to its end to feel the charge. Violence. Trapped like a djinn in metal casing.

When they lifted the lid of the final chest, it was full of old bedding. The scent it released—startling, unmistakable—was the exact odor of a Venetian cathedral. With it came a full-color memory, catching her hard at the scruff: the bench that numbed her bottom, a ceiling so high it held sky inside it. Murmurous Italian running like an open tap, and a man in stitched robes walking by trailing this very scent. Nanny whispered the word in her ear. Incensario. A little metal pineapple full of God’s cologne.

Guinevere pressed her cheek to plaque-colored cotton and stuck her arms down either side, feeling around until her fingers met something solid. Ennis helped her pull it out: a hard-sided leather purse with a seashell clasp, reeking of frankincense.

Inside the purse was a hand. Distinctly feminine in shape, carved from a wood so pale it had the translucent glow of a salt lamp. Guinevere loved it on sight.

“Lemme see,” Ennis said, and she gave it over reluctantly. It was a little larger than their own hands, though smaller than that of a grown-up woman’s. The base of the wrist had a rough texture where it must’ve snapped off a larger figure.

“Weird,” he murmured, turning it over, then brightened. “Let’s bury it.”

“Why?” She snatched it back, clasping it to her chest. “I love it.”

He made a face like, Your funeral.

All day they’d heard the movements of the caretaker, his boots making slow knocks over the floor. Now something under the house’s skin ticked, an unmistakable waking sound, and the lights turned on. Guinevere hadn’t noticed the bulbs spaced around the room until their filaments went fiery. They drove the shadows into the corners and flattened the twilit squares of window.

She blinked, vision veined with afterglow. “He fixed it!”

Together they looked out at the deep blue world. Grass and the spindly heads of a little orchard, not apple trees but peach. Beyond that, the woods. She imagined herself in a crow’s nest atop the highest oak, peering down her rifle at pirates scurrying through the underbrush. Bang.

The caretaker stepped into sight far below, crossing the grass with his red dog.

“Come on,” Ennis said.

They ran from the house’s crown to its foot and out into the evening. It was the tricky clear-sky cold of late spring. The sky was deepening to navy, with flashes in it that would become stars. She thought they’d have to run to catch up with the man, but he was standing at the orchard’s edge, waiting.

He had a funny face. Long eyes, wide mouth, freckles like flecks of wet paint someone had smeared. He smiled at them and his mouth grew wider. Guinevere wasn’t sure whether she liked him or not.

“Evening, explorers,” he said. “Find anything interesting?”

“Books,” Guinevere said, while Ennis said, “Bullets.”

“The bare necessities.” The man’s eyes creased hard at the corners.

Even up close she couldn’t decide how old he was. The question felt too slippery for something so simple.

Ennis crouched in front of the dog and held out his hand. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Ask her,” the man replied.

Ennis looked up, scowling. He hated to be teased. Guinevere minded it less and wasn’t entirely sure the dog couldn’t speak. Just in case, she knelt politely and said, “What’s your name?”

The dog was so pretty, fur hanging around her face like the parted hair of a French singer. Though she looked intelligent enough to speak, she said nothing.

“You’re making fun of us,” Guinevere said reproachfully, rising. “Now we won’t tell you our names.”

“Too late. I got ’em off your dad.” The man tipped his head and narrowed his eyes, the way Edith did when she lit a cigarette. “How long you planning to stay?”

“Forever,” Guinevere said. Ennis elbowed her in the ribs.

“No, we’re not. It’s a vacation house. It belongs to our grandpa.” He didn’t mention they’d never met this grandpa. “Nobody’s stayed here for years and years.”

The man pursed his wide mouth. The effect was unsettling: a long red caterpillar drawing itself into a ball. “Really? Nobody at all?”

The children looked narrowly at each other. He wanted them to ask, Why did you say it like that? A moment passed, and Guinevere sighed. “Why’d you say it like that?”

The beautiful dog made a sound in her throat. Not a growl, exactly. The man put a hand on her head. The skin around his eyes was whiter in the creases, a spray of pale lines you could see when he stopped smiling.

“Because I’ve forgotten my manners.” Then his eyes narrowed. “What’s that?”

He was looking at the carved hand. Guinevere had forgotten she was holding it.

“You better hold on to that.” He cast a quick glance toward the house. “Don’t bring it out here. Keep it inside, so it doesn’t get lost.”

“Why?”

He winked without smiling. “Good luck charm.”

“Really? How do you—”

The man cut her off with a chirp that brought the dog to quivering attention. Guinevere itched to run her fingers through all that strawberry fur. But she wasn’t the kind of animal you were allowed to pet.

“Have a nice vacation,” the caretaker said, and headed back into the woods.

Guinevere watched man and dog disappear, then looked down at the wooden hand. It was obvious now: the thing was radiant with good fortune. She brushed her lips over its scented fingertips.

They returned by way of the orchard, matted grass and hidden divots and the occasional surprise of a ground creature scuttling. If no one lived full-time in the house, who had planted the peaches? Already hard green lobes hung from the branches, dreaming their hot-weather dreams. When Guinevere touched one it felt velveted and firm, like the back of a fist.

The sky had darkened when they weren’t paying attention. From out of the woods rose a lonesome two-tone whistle: the man, talking to his dog. Ahead of them, a row of third-floor windows was lit. Their mother’s shape moved slowly through the golden boxes.

The night, the cold, the silver scoop of the moon. A sky crowded with stars you could actually see, and ahead of them a house she already loved.

There was a secret pressing against Guinevere’s ribs from the inside, making her breath catch. Or maybe it was a wish. She held her wooden hand tightly and wished it.

I want to stay here. I want to live here forever.

The Children, by Melissa Albert will be released on June 2, 2026 from William Morrow. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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