The Ocean at the End of the Lane Hardcover - 2013

From the rear cover

A Globe & Mail 100 Selection

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.

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 04/01/2013, Page 32
• Booklist Ed Choice Adu Bk YA's, 01/01/2014, Page 12
• BookPage, 07/01/2013, Page 0
• Entertainment Weekly, 06/21/2013, Page 69
• Kirkus Bea Big Book Guide, 05/15/2013, Page 5
• Kirkus Best Fiction, 11/15/2013, Page 16
• Kirkus Reviews, 04/01/2013, Page 12
• Library Journal, 01/01/2013, Page 0
• Library Journal Prepub Alert, 01/01/2013, Page 62
• New York Times Book Review, 06/30/2013, Page 14
• People Weekly, 06/24/2013, Page 51
• Publishers Weekly, 04/01/2013, Page 12
• Shelf Awareness, 06/21/2013, Page 0
• SLJ Best Adult Bks 4 Teens, 12/01/2013, Page 43