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Watch Neil Gaiman Answer Book Club Questions

Special Feature

Watch Neil Gaiman Answer Book Club Questions

In July, we ran a special contest in which winners were asked to submit questions for #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman about his latest book, THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. Readers were clearly enamored with the book, and the response was phenomenal! Now you can watch Neil answer the top questions from book groups.

With his signature wit, he covers topics ranging from the particular (or non-particular) memory that inspired the story to why he feels compelled to write about what happens when characters come home from their quest (because we can all agree that "and they lived happily ever after" is not a trope that reflects real life in any way), and whether or not he likes waffles to the absolute best question he was ever asked. Neil also admits his love for book groups, which share books as a "communal, pleasurable thing" and are admirably "never backward in coming forward."

Click here to watch Neil Gaiman answer YOUR book club's questions.

More about THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE:
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.

A groundbreaking work from a master, THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.