Locus Award nominee 2014, British Fantasy Award nominee 2014.
A major new work from "a writer to make readers rejoice" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) — a moving story of memory, magic, and survival.
Sussex, England. 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, 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.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie — magical, comforting, wise beyond her years — promised to protect him, no matter what.
A groundbreaking work from a master, 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. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
Share your experience with other Risingshadow readers.
What Risingshadow readers think about this book
The thing about Gaiman books imo is that you either like 'em or you don't. And I liked this one very much.
Intriguing memory lane of childhood fairytale, by the eyes of 9 year old boy/adult man.
There a reason we don't remember some things happened long time ago as good as we should...
Fairytale for adults!
Although well-written and well-done, The Ocean at the End of the lane, was a depressing novel that made me cry for over an hour. Don't get me wrong, it was a great piece of literature, however it brought back personal memories. Such as when fluffy, the kitten died, it reminded how my fluffy cat died. At least the opal miner tried to apologize, my neighbors did not. The rest of the novel made me cry for other reasons. It was a wonderfully depressing book, but then again i am easily drawn to tears,
