Book Bearings
Cover of The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

  • 224 pages · about 4 hours
  • First published 2013
  • 49 editions

Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.

1 About this book

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.

Good for readers who want: fantasy, a coming-of-age story, and magic.

  • Magic
  • Survival
  • Fantasy
  • Coming of age
  • Horror
  • Good and evil
  • Boys
  • Women

2 About Neil Gaiman

Born 1960

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (; born Neil Richard Gaiman; 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, audio theatre, and screenplays. His works include the comic series The Sandman (1989–1996) and the novels Good Omens (1990), Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005), The Graveyard Book (2008) and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013).

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

3 More by Neil Gaiman

4 Similar books

Find a book that fits your moment