The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

A sweet-and-sour meditation on the wonders of childhood, this novella draws upon a motif found in much of Gaiman’s shorter fiction: the melancholy and magic of looking back.



Maybe it’s because the protagonist is a middle-aged Brit returning to his childhood home, or maybe it’s because Lettie Hempstock is a charismatic, remarkable, magical girl in an oeuvre filled with charismatic, remarkable, magical girls, either way, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a deeply intimate, personal story that sticks with you, despite its diminutive size.





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 Lettie magical, comforting, wise beyond her years promised to protect him, no matter what.





Unabridged

Narrated By: Neil Gaiman

Duration: 5:42:21

Format: MP3

Bitrate: 64kbps