num_pages: 181
description: Sussex England. 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 Lettiemagical comforting wise beyond her yearspromised 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. It is a stirring terrifying and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
language: English
title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
publisher: William Morrow Books