The Ocean at the End of the Lane
First edition hardcover for the United States
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| Author | Neil Gaiman |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Good and evil, survival, magic |
| Genre | Fiction, fantasy, surrealism |
| Publisher | William Morrow and Company |
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Publication date
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18 June 2013 |
| Media type | Print, e-book, audiobook |
| Pages | 178 pages |
| Award | Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (2014) |
| ISBN | |
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a 2013 novel by British author Neil Gaiman. The work was first published on 18 June 2013 through William Morrow and Company and follows an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers events that began forty years earlier.
Themes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane include the search for self-identity and the "disconnect between childhood and adulthood".
Among other honors, it was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards.
The book starts with the unnamed protagonist returning to his childhood hometown for a funeral. There he revisits the home in which he and his sister grew up and remembers a young girl named Lettie Hempstock, who had claimed that the pond behind her house was an ocean. He stops at the house where Lettie had lived with her mother and grandmother and encounters a member of her family and starts to remember forgotten incidents from the past.
The main narrative starts as he recalls a time when an opal miner, who was a boarder at the boy's home, steals the narrator's father's car and commits suicide in the back seat, having gambled away his friends' money; this death allows a supernatural being to gain access to our world, leaving money for people in unpleasant ways.
After a coin becomes lodged in the narrator's throat overnight, choking him, he seeks his neighbor Lettie's help. She agrees to help, insisting that he accompany her on the travel necessary to find the spirit and bind it. Having been instructed never to let go of her hand, in a moment of surprise he does, and in that instant something lodges in his foot. Once home, he pulls what appears to be a worm out of his foot, but a piece is left inside him.
The next day, his mother tells him she is starting a new job and a woman named Ursula Monkton is to look after him and his sister. The narrator takes an instant dislike to her and soon realizes that she is actually the worm he had pulled out of his foot. She had used him as a way to travel out of the place he and Lettie had visited and is now inhabiting his house. Ursula quickly ingratiates herself with his family, winning over his sister and seducing his father, while the narrator is alienated from his family and is almost drowned in the bath by his father as Ursula watches.
Most of the narrator's time is then spent locked up in his bedroom, avoiding Ursula. Frightened, he manages to escape one night. He barely makes it to the Hempstock farm, where the Hempstocks take care of him and remove the wormhole from his foot, which had been left behind by Ursula as an escape path. Lettie and the narrator confront Ursula, who refuses offers from the Hempstocks to leave peacefully for a world that is less dangerous for her. Unwilling to believe that there could be anything in the world that could harm her, Ursula is attacked and eliminated by "hunger birds," entities that serve a purpose similar to scavengers. These insist on eating the narrator's heart, as a piece of Ursula's wormhole still remains there. The Hempstocks bring him back to the safety of their property through the ocean by their house, which Lettie carries to him in a bucket. While in the ocean, the narrator understands the nature of all things, but the memory fades once he gets out.
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Wikipedia