The Ocean at the End of the Lane

About The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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.

Awards & lists

• ✦Nebula Awards 2014 — Best Novel (nominee)
• ✦World Fantasy Awards 2014 — Best Novel (nominee)
• 🏆Locus Awards 2014 — Best Fantasy Novel (winner)
• ✦Mythopoeic Awards 2014 — Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature (nominee)
• ✦British Fantasy Awards 2014 — Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel (nominee)
• 📰New York Times bestseller list — Combined Print And E-Book Fiction, 2013

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