Annotation
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. 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. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet sitting by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean), the unremembered past comes flooding back.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. A stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
![](/img/2003/35/ac/bdb92b13472598edade6.jpg)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
![](/img/2003/1a/9f/3bbf375e4de8bc45fc04.jpg)
Dedication
For Amanda,
who wanted to know
Epigraph
“I remember my own
childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I
mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.”
Maurice Sendak, in conversation with
Art Spiegelman,
The New
Yorker, September 27, 1993
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
0.
Prologue
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
Epilogue
Acknowledgments