Agnes Nutter’s prophecies are the world’s only reliable guide to the future, and according to Agnes the world is set to end next Saturday. This time, the armies of Good and Evil seem to be taking it seriously, as do the four Bikers of the Apocalypse. Naturally, they would all prefer the apocalypse didn’t happen, particularly one carousing demon and a somewhat fussy angel. Someone also seems to have misplaced the Antichrist, but that’s just a drop in the bucket, really.
491 pages.
"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."
I was not expecting how this book turned out. It is so hauntingly nostalgic of childhood and I loved the dash of magic the Hempstock family embodied. It is hard to tell if the story is the vivid imagination of a child processing a family trauma, or some forgotten reality that we can only believe in when we are young. I will definitely be revisiting this book in the future and looking at some of this authors other books.
72 Pages
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
