Frightened, he manages to escape one night. Most of the narrator's time is then spent locked up in his bedroom, avoiding Ursula.

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.

She had used him as a way to travel out of the place he and Lettie had visited and is now inhabiting his house. The narrator takes an instant dislike to her and soon realises that she is actually the worm he had pulled out of his foot. 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. Once home, he pulls what appears to be a worm out of his foot, but a piece is left inside him. 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.

She agrees to help, insisting that he accompany her on the travel necessary to find the spirit and bind it. The main narrative starts as he recalls a time when an opal miner, who was living 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 the narrator's world, leaving money for people in unpleasant ways.Īfter a coin becomes lodged in the narrator's throat overnight, choking him, he seeks his neighbour Lettie's help. 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. There he revisits the area 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. The book starts with the unnamed protagonist returning to his childhood hometown for a funeral. Īmong other honours, it was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. Themes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane include the search for self-identity and the 'disconnect between childhood and adulthood'.

The illustrated edition of the work was published on 5 November 2019, featuring the artwork of Australian fine artist Elise Hurst. 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 Ocean at the End of the Lane is a 2013 novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (2014)

Neil gaiman end of the lane