Little, Big

Winner of the World Fantasy Award, Little, Big is eloquent, sensual, funny and unforgettable, a true fantasy masterwork. John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood—not found on any map—to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder. Accolades World Fantasy Award Winner 1982 Reviews 'A book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy' Ursula K. Le Guin 'I think Crowley is so good that he has left everybody else in the dust' Peter Straub 'Ambitious, dazzling, strangely moving, a marvellous magic-realist family chronicle' Washington Post "For full-throated, mature fantasy, Crowley - author of the superb Engine Summer (1979) and others - is becoming the American writer against whom all others will have to be measured. Here he has made a large family saga with a silvery underside; he has housed it in a mansion called Edgewood (built in every style by a 19th-century visionary named John Drink-water, whose book Architecture of Country Houses eventually comes to be understood as the Book of Life itself); and he has let it run through four generations. Smoky Barnable, a proofreader for the phone book in "The City" some short time henceforth, opens the story as he arrives at Edgewood to marry the long-bodied Daily Alice. Like all Drink-waters, Daily Alice knows about - and is not flustered by - the fairies that inhabit the surrounding woods; in fact, when Smoky later strays and beds Alice's younger sister Sophie, the resulting love-child is promptly taken away by the same fairies (to lessen family strife) and lives for 25 years after upon a flying stork (in wonderful aerial chapters). That Crowley can so deftly pull off these shifts in wondrous perspective indicates his mastery of the mode - but he goes further, setting himself even harder tasks. When Smoky's and Alice's son, Auberon, takes off for The City to seek his own truth, a more contemporary level is introduced (Auberon writes TV soap operas, falls in love with an appealing Puerto Rican girl named Sylvie). . . only to be stretched into another dimension: Sylvie finds herself enrolled in a brief, awful resurgence of the Holy Roman Empire (!), and its last leader, Frederick Barbarossa, comes back re-incarnated to give it another shot. And all the doings - political, social, amorous, personal, spiritual - are finally aligned to "The Tale," hints of which are found in old Drink-water's book . . . and in an orrery which Smoky finds in an attic (it turns out to be a perpetual motion machine). Hidden or revealed, metamorphosed or fixed, the characters here are forever smack up against the implied question of the title: Is life a small speck on a huge blueprint? Or a big, clumsy blindness to one exquisitely tiny grain of truth? So - with the lovely wending of its brook-clear prose (this is the sort of book you'd like to read aloud, over months, to a sharp ten-year-old), its unforced philosophical and literate harmonies, and its genuine imaginativeness - Crowley's novel seems like a sort of chime-organ: lovely sounds from a big, uncommonly satisfying, and elegant what if? book." (Kirkus Reviews)