Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees – Sweet Sequels Out of Print Collection

Name: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees - Sweet Sequels Out of Print Collection
SKU: 38465
Price: 25.00 USD
Availability: InStock

$25.00

1 in stock (can be backordered)

Sweet Sequels Out of Print Collection

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees with cover art by Haleigh DeRocher

This is the complete and unabridged text of Hope Mirrlees’s novel, Lud-in-the-Mist. This edition is available exclusively in the Sweet Sequels shop. This beautiful hardcover edition features original cover art. It measures 6×9.

Read more about the Out of Print Collection here.

Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a British translator, poet, and novelist. Lud-in-the-Mist was her third and final novel, published in 1926. This book is proof that there were great fantasy novels before Tolkien came onto the scene – Mirrlees’s way of balancing the mundane and the miraculous, the serious and the comic, in this fantastical book, sets it down as one of the greatest fantasies of the early 1900s. It was written considerably before the existence of fantasy as a marketing genre; therefore, it was seen as unusual and has been rarely noticed and seldom reprinted. In 1970 an American reprint was published without the author’s permission (Ballantine attempted to find the author, but their attempt was unsuccessful). Mirrlees died in 1978, and the book passed into the public domain in 2021. Neil Gaiman was greatly inspired by the work, citing it as “the single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century.”

From the back:

“And this is but another proof that the Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning!”

Lud-in-the-Mist is a verdant country town cradled by two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dapple begins beyond the hills, in Fairyland. Long, long ago, fairy things had been looked upon with reverence, and fairy fruit enjoyed by the citizens of the Lud-in-the-Mist. But it is now a crime to consume the fruit, and anything related to Fairyland is unspeakable. When the mayor’s son falls sick and is believed to have eaten the forbidden fruit, a mystery unfolds and an adventure ensues.

Published 30 years before Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Lud-in-the-Mist played a large role in the establishment of the modern fantasy genre. Neil Gaiman was greatly inspired by the work, citing it as “the single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century.”

This exciting title is now available with beautiful cover art by Haleigh DeRocher, found exclusively at sweetsequels.com.

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