The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman · 2013

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood village for a funeral and finds himself drawn back to the farm at the end of the lane, where a strange, ancient family once lived. Sitting by their pond, he recovers buried memories of a fateful summer when he was seven years old: the peculiar Hempstock women who took him in, and a dangerous entity that entered his family through a seemingly ordinary act of kindness gone wrong. Blending horror, myth, and the texture of childhood memory, the novel explores how thin the boundary is between the everyday world adults inhabit and the vast, uncanny truths that children sense but cannot yet name.

Books mentioned in The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2)

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “It was told by the Mouse from Alice in Wonderland, the Mouse she met swimming in the pool of her own tears.”
• Sadie Sees It Through by Ethel Talbot: “I read Sandie Sees It Through, another of my mother's books. (Text spells it 'Sandie'; this matches the real 1939 girls'-school story 'Sadie Sees It Through' by Ethel Talbot, consistent with the surrounding reference to the narrator's mother's own childhood books from the 1930s/1940s.)”