This story will make you nostalgic for your childhood self. Not the one you see smiling back at you in photo albums, but the one who knew things that grown ups simply couldn’t understand. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a beautiful little book full of truth, nostalgia and the sweet melancholy of remembering. This book is a quick read (only 180 pages)– and is a perfect choice for anyone who enjoys short stories, a love-hate relationship with the past, or magical realism.
From Goodreads: 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. Check it out on Goodreads!