Pearl, a young wife and mother, loses her husband in a plane crash and is left to live with his family on the island. The island's population is small: the husband's brother, his strange wife, a degenerate professor and a dozen children. Children? Joy Williams is a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a virtuoso master of words and a genius thinker, whose novel “The Changeling” was published in 1978 and was far ahead of its time. As the book’s translator Dmitry Shepelev writes: “This is a novel about love and despair, about women and men, about adults and children, about people and animals. Like the life of the main character, he masterfully avoids meaning, like a bird avoids a trap; he is too beautiful, too monstrous, too truthful for this. This story is like an atonal symphony, shock therapy, a natural disaster - it will turn you inside out and make you laugh through your tears. And the main life lesson that you will learn: don’t ask why I do this, ask why?”