I was hesitating to download this audio book because I read Neverwhere years ago for a book club read and it was too disturbing and dark for my taste to finish. Having said that, in no way am I saying Gailman is not a good writer. He is s superb story teller and his imagination is really something else.

Have you ever heard Him speak? I can listen to Him talk all day long. Anyhow, I came across The Ocean At The End of The Lane last night and decided to take a chance. Wow, am I glad I did! I was literally drawn in from the first few lines. That really says a lot about the story. At first, I was thinking maybe because it was His voice that is so mesmerizing…. but I think it’s everything about the story, the characters and the way He is weaving the tale. This is one story I am going to be sad when I get to the end of it.

Stephanie M. Hopkins

About the book:

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gailman

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.

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.