Lud-in-the-Mist is the city where the river Dapple, flowing down from the forbidden realm of Fairyland, meets the ordinary world. For centuries, the citizens of Dorimare have suppressed all memory of the fairy fruit that once graced their tables, banishing the mystical Duke Aubrey and declaring such things criminal. Now Nathaniel Chanticleer, the pragmatic mayor, faces a crisis: his young son Ranulph has eaten the forbidden fruit, and the boy's soul appears to be slipping away into the land of dreams. What begins as a father's desperate search for a cure becomes an odyssey through Dorimare's hushed history, forcing Nathaniel to confront the very fears he has spent his life outrunning. Mirrlees constructs a world that feels like a half-remembered fairy tale told by someone who also knows grief, weaving the numinous into the texture of daily life with an assurance that would influence fantasy for decades to come. This is a novel about what happens when the walls we build between ourselves and wonder start to crack, and the terrible, beautiful things that might come through.
