Lud-In-The-Mist - by Hope Mirrlees

About the Book

Between the mountains and the sea, between the sea and Fairyland, lay the Free State of Dorimare and its picturesque capital, Lud-in-the-Mist. No Luddite ever had any truck with fairies or Fairyland. Bad business, those fairies. The people of Dorimare had run them out generations ago--and the Duke of Dorimare along with them. Until the spring of his fiftieth year, Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of Dorimare, had lived a sleepy life with his only son, Ranulph. But as he grew, Ranulph was more and more fond of talking nonsense about golden cups, and snow-white ladies milking azure cows, and the sound of tinkling bridles at midnight. And when Ranulph was twelve, he got caught up with the fairies, and Nathaniel's life would never be the same.

Book Synopsis

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

Hope Mirrlees penned Lud-in-the-Mist--a classic fantasy novel--in 1926. When the town of Lud severs its ties to a Faerie land, an illegal trade in fairy fruit develops. But eating the fruit has horrible and wondrous effects.

"Helen Hope Mirrlees was born in England in 1887. Mirrlees was a close friend of such literary lights as Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Katharine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats. Under her own name, she published three novels: Madeleine -- One of Life's Jansenists (1921); The Counterplot (1924); and her 1926 classic fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist, which has acknowledged inspiration to the likes of Neil Gaiman, Mary Gentle, Elizabeth Hand, Johanna Russ, and Tim Powers."--SF Site

"Hope Mirrlees' writing, usually underrated, moves between gently crazy humour, poetic snatches, real menace, and real poignancy."--The Encyclopedia of Fantasy