The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories

A boy discovers a celestial omnibus that climbs into the sky, carrying him to a realm where the ghosts of poets and philosophers debate beauty in a meadow of asphodel. This is E.M. Forster at his most beguiling: a collection of stories where the respectable surfaces of Edwardian English life crack open to reveal something numinous, terrifying, or deeply strange. The title story follows young Tom, who escapes his buttoned-up family for an omnibus pulled by white horses that travels to a heavenly mountain where Wordsworth and Shelley hold court. Other tales venture into the Italian countryside, where a picnic is interrupted by an inexplicable panic, or into the English home counties, where the supernatural intrudes upon stultifying propriety. Forster, that keen anatomist of English manners, here reveals another gift: the capacity to make wonder feel not sentimental but genuinely unsettling. These are stories about imagination as a force that humbles the sensible, about children who see what their elders have trained themselves to miss. They work their magic on the reader the way the omnibus works on Tom: silently, irrationally, impossible to forget.