Lud-In-The-Mist

Lud-in-the-Mist - a prosperous country town situated where two rivers meet: the Dawl and the Dapple. The latter, which has its source in the land of Faerie, is a great trial to Lud, which had long rejected anything 'other', preferring to believe only in what is known, what is solid.

Nathaniel Chanticleer is a somewhat dreamy, slightly melancholy man, not one for making waves, who is deliberately ignoring a vital part of his own past; a secret he refuses even to acknowledge. But with the disappearance of his own daughter, and a long-overdue desire to protect his young son, he realises that something is changing in Lud - and something must be done.

Lud-in-the-Mist is a true classic, an adult fairy tale exploring the need to embrace what we fear and to come to terms with 'the shadows' - those sweet and dark impulses that our public selves ignore or repress.

“The single most beautiful and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century”

The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book

A Shakespearian tragi-comedy, a murder mystery, and a multi-faceted allegory all in one; and a damn good story, too

[Mirrlees has] a view of her own about books and style ... and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature

The tone is assured and urbane, with aphorisms dripping from every other sentence and a real sense of the menacing and the bizarre. It has been a major influence on genre fantasy since its republication in the late 1960s - Cambridge Guide to Women Writers

[involves] fundamental questions of how a society and its members understand their own history, and how they make sense of the conflicts embedded in social class and political power - TLS

Helen Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a British author of novels and poems, whose three novels are Lud-in-the-Mist, Madeleine, and Counterplot, and a book of poetry, Moods and Tensions: Poems. She was one of the Bloomsbury Group and counted among her good friends T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and Virginia Woolf.

Lud-in-the-Mist - a prosperous country town situated where two rivers meet: the Dawl and the Dapple. The latter, which has its source in the land of Faerie, is a great trial to Lud, which had long rejected anything 'other', preferring to believe only in what is known, what is solid. Nathaniel Chanticleer is a somewhat dreamy, slightly melancholy man, not one for making waves, who is deliberately ignoring a vital part of his own past; a secret he refuses even to acknowledge. But with the disappearance of his own daughter, and a long-overdue desire to protect his young son, he realises that something is changing in Lud - and something must be done. Lud-in-the-Mist is a true classic, an adult fairy tale exploring the need to embrace what we fear and to come to terms with 'the shadows' - those sweet and dark impulses that our public selves ignore or repress.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.