The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman
Hennepin County Library audiobook 5 discs
genre: ? metaphysical fiction?
read by the author

This is a very unusual book, which is not surprising to anyone who is familiar with Gaiman's writing style. I enjoyed it, but hope to get a print copy of the book before book club discusses this in April. The audio experience was wonderful (I love it when the author reads it!) but I really enjoy seeing the text as I read.

From the Harper Collins website:
"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"

I am really looking forward to our discussion! I didn't love the metaphysical aspect - the ponderings of this child on the nature of the universe and the Hempstock women. But I love Gaiman's prose! I could picture the fairy ring, Ursula, and the little yellow washbasin perfectly . . .