Puck of Pook's Hill
Two children staging Shakespeare's fairy play in a Sussex meadow summon something far older than the Bard's imagination. Puck appears, the oldest Old Thing in England, and reveals the children stand on sacred ground: Pook's Hill. What follows is a series of encounters with ghosts of England's past, a Roman centurion, the smith Weland, a Norman knight, each drawn from history by ancient magic to speak across the centuries to Dan and Una. Each story is bracketed by a poem that binds past to present, building toward a quiet, profound truth Puck speaks at the end: "Weland gave the Sword, the Sword gave the Treasure, and the Treasure gave the Law. It's as natural as an oak growing." This is historical fantasy at its most wistful and intimate, less concerned with adventure than with the strange intimacy of time, how the dead live on in objects, stories, and the land itself. Kipling wrote it at his house in Sussex, and the landscape breathes through every page. For readers who loved The Once and Future King or Nightingale's peculiar magic, and for anyone who has ever stood on old ground and wondered who stood there before.
