The Ocean at the End of the Lane
- 224
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 5 weeks on the list, peaked at #2
- Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
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Our view
This short, dark novel of childhood and magic is strongest in its striking imagery. Its frame is a funeral that brings a man back to the place where he grew up, and to memories of what happened there four decades earlier. Some readers find the telling hazy, though, and those who want events spelled out, or a firm ending, may come away unsatisfied.
Worth knowing A man in his forties drives back to the Sussex lane where he grew up, for a funeral, and sits by the pond at the Hempstock farm that Lettie Hempstock, eleven when he was seven, told him was an ocean; what he remembers from there is the summer a lodger killed himself in the family car, something old came through from outside the world and took the shape of a nanny called Ursula Monkton, and the three Hempstock women, who have been on that farm since before the moon, dealt with it. Neil Gaiman wrote it for his wife while she was away, meaning it to be a short story, and it came out in 2013 at under 200 pages, his shortest adult novel and the one most readers call his best; it was Book of the Year at the British National Book Awards and became a National Theatre play in 2019.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
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. The illustrated edition of the work was published on 5 November 2019, featuring the artwork of Australian fine artist Elise Hurst.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.1 across 2,091 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 93% of the weight and the score stays at 8.1 — the Fantasy average of 8.0 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.0 | 122 | 6% |
| Hardcover | 8.1 | 2K | 94% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Ocean at the End of the Lane?
It has 224 pages — shorter than 98% of the ranked books in Fantasy.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Fantasy — and a score of 8.1, the closest to this book.
