Returning to his childhood home in rural Sussex for a funeral, a middle-aged man finds himself drawn down a country lane to a farm at its end, and to a duck pond a girl once called her ocean. Sitting there, he remembers something he had entirely forgotten: the strange and terrifying weeks when he was seven years old and the world briefly came apart.
It began with a death and a handful of coins, and with the girl at the end of the lane—Lettie Hempstock, who claimed she and her mother and grandmother were far older than they looked. When something ancient and hungry followed the boy home in the shape of a new housekeeper, it wormed its way into his family and turned the people he trusted against him. Only the Hempstock women, guardians of forces older than the moon, stood between him and being unmade.
Neil Gaiman's short, luminous novel is a dark fairy tale about childhood, memory, and the enormous, unspeakable things that can happen to small people. Tender and frightening in equal measure, it asks how much of who we were survives into who we become.