Dream Days

Kenneth Grahame, the creator of The Wind in the Willows, returns to the luminous territory of childhood in this collection of eight stories and sketches. Originally published in 1898, Dream Days serves as a companion volume to The Golden Age, featuring the same cast of five siblings navigating the peculiar terrain between imagination and the adult world. The collection opens with 'The Golden Age,' a grouping of interconnected tales that capture the children's passionate debates over knowledge, Edward's obsession with military glory, another child's deep attunement to nature, Harold's naval ambitions, while the grown-ups remain blissfully, tragically out of touch. But the crown jewel here is 'The Reluctant Dragon,' a witty, anti-war fable in which a mild-mannered dragon and a peaceful knight rewrite the rules of heroism. Grahame paints childhood without sentimentality: its rages, its griefs, its fierce allegiances, and its private cosmologies. The adults hover at the edges, incomprehending. What remains is the bittersweet recognition that these days are fleeting, that to remember them at all is already to begin losing them. For readers who loved The Wind in the Willows and anyone who has ever been young.