The Ocean at the End of the Lane

A Novel

By: Neil Gaiman

Narrated by: Neil Gaiman

Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

Audie Award Finalist, Narration by the Author or Authors, 2014

Audie Award Finalist, Fiction, 2014

Sussex, England: A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. 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. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet sitting by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean), the unremembered past comes flooding back. 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. A stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

©2013 Neil Gaiman (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers

A joy to here.

This is so great I couldn't just stop. Its excellent.Well worth the listiners time enjoying

Truly gifted author!

Wow. What an amazing book. Strangely captivating and the most odd yet subtle and simple. Simultaneously beautiful and uncharacteristically terrifying. I have fallen in love with the author after this book. What a gift!

Love Neil Gaiman

I very much enjoyed this book. I am a huge Gaiman fan so surprise. I also love when Neil himself narrates as he does for this book.

There's only one Gaiman

I'm never sure how to describe Neil Gaiman's writing - he's one of those rare authors who seems to be a genre unto himself, somewhat like Ray Bradbury (who is NOT a science fiction writer, despite "Martian Chronicles" erroneously earning him that label).
In this book, Gaiman ventures into some of the same territory as early Stephen King - the inner world of children and how they perceive life. But where King, in his customary style, made the subject seem tragic, disturbing, and possibly covered with biting insects, Gaiman (in his own characteristic way) gives even the tragic and frightening material a magical, reassuring tone.
I am a hard-headed, rational-materialist engineer, whose closest thing to a priest would probably be Carl Sagan, but I have enough small-child left in me that I'm always fascinated by Gaiman's vision of secret worlds behind reality, with things and forces both luminous and dark dwelling in them, and of people finding their way in that multiverse. Here, he delivers another gem in his unique Gaimanian genre, this time through the eyes of a child crafted so well that even I was able to relate to him, even though my own comfortable, news-watching, scientifically-literate childhood has always made me feel like I was 20 even in my earliest memories.
As always, Gaiman has the perfect voice for reading his own work (I can't imagine, say, RC Bray reading this!) and tells the story as if it was happening to him right there in the studio.
Honestly, if you liked any other Gaiman audio book, you'll like this one -- click the button and get to listening!

book review

it was an interesting book. It was worth the listen. I'm very happy Neil Gaiman read it.

Audiobook jackpot

If you made a Venn Diagram of great stories and good narrators, this audiobook exists in that slim and elusive overlapping area of the two. Listening was an unabashed delight!

Enthralling!

From start to finish, I remained captivated by the story and the characters. Another satisfying Neil Gaiman novel.

Very good story

I liked this book more than I expected I would. The story held my interest from start to finish. I prefer to listen to books than watching TV. I am 64 years old and easily grow bored with anything on my 100+ channels of TV. I find books involve my imagination and this book did not disappoint.
I liked the book for it's lack of gore or sex, which is not to day I'd recommend it for the very young. I wouldn't, but if you like science fiction with a good story line, this book is for you.

Beautiful

It’s a beautiful story. Not his most capturing , but absolutely his most fantastic. It captures the essence of childhood wonder in a way nothing else I have read has come close to, and it makes you wish to feel the fae like a child does again.

one of my Favorites

Neil Gaiman storytelling is just so amazing👏 I absolutely love his voice and his chargers!💖