Lud-In-The-Mist

(Paperback)

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Description

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.

Reviews

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

Author Bio

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.