In the English village of Wall, a stone barrier with a single guarded gap separates the ordinary world from the land of Faerie beyond it. Every nine years a market is held in the meadow past the wall, and it is there that young Dunstan Thorn meets a captive faerie girl — an encounter that, months later, leaves a baby named Tristran on the village side of the gap.
Eighteen years on, Tristran Thorn is hopelessly in love with Victoria Forester, the most beautiful girl for a hundred miles around. Watching a star fall somewhere beyond the wall, he promises to bring it back to her in exchange for her hand, and steps through the gap into Faerie. What he finds where the star came down is not a lump of rock but a young woman, Yvaine, with a broken leg and a very poor opinion of him.
Tristran is not the only one hunting her. The surviving sons of the dying Lord of Stormhold need the topaz she carries to settle the succession, and three ancient witches want her heart, which will restore their youth. Stardust is Neil Gaiman's fairy tale for adults, written in the tradition of pre-Tolkien English fantasy — a quest, a romance, and a journey that ends somewhere its hero never expected.