The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel
Neil Gaiman
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0062459368
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
UK National Book Awards 2013 "Book of the Year"
“Fantasy of the very best.” Wall Street Journal
A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse where she once lived, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
A groundbreaking work as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out.
“[Gaiman’s] mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown.” New York Times Book Review
and Sullivan since I was three, when my father’s youngest sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolanthe, a play filled with lords and fairies. I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. My aunt had died soon after, of pneumonia, in the hospital. That evening my father arrived home from work and he brought a cardboard box with him. In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I
trouble, but the kitten’s bite was not hard, just scared. Her voice came from all around us, as the storm-wind gusted. “You kept me away from here for a long time. But then you brought me a door, and I used him to carry me out of my cell. And what can you do now that I am out?” Lettie didn’t seem angry. She thought about it, then she said, “I could make you a new door. Or, better still, I could get Granny to send you across the ocean, all the way to wherever you came from in the beginning.”
got from the field we were in to the farmhouse so quickly. “You were lucky,” said Lettie. “Fifteen feet further back, and the field belongs to Colin Anders.” “You would have come anyway,” I told her. “You would have saved me.” She squeezed my arm with her hand but she said nothing. I said, “Lettie. I don’t want to go home.” That was not true. I wanted to go home more than anything, just not to the place I had fled that night. I wanted to go back to the home I had lived in before the opal
my father’s anger, before the bathtub. I wanted that yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly. I tried to pull the dream that had upset me so to the front of my mind, but it would not come. There had been betrayal in it, I knew, and loss, and time. The dream had left me scared to go back to sleep: the fireplace was almost dark now, with only the deep red glow of embers in the hearth to mark that it had once been burning, once had given light. I climbed down from the four-poster bed, and
got your prey. You cleaned up. You can go home now.” The shadows did not move. She said, “Go!” The shadows on the grass stayed exactly where they were. If anything they seemed darker, more real than they had been before. – You have no power over us. “Perhaps I don’t,” said Lettie. “But I called you here, and now I’m telling you to go home. You devoured Skarthach of the Keep. You’ve done your business. Now clear off.” – We are cleaners. We came to clean. “Yes, and you’ve cleaned the thing