The Wind in the Willows

There is a world by the river where the grass is always green and the afternoon stretches forever. Mole, weary of his dark underground home, emerges into spring and finds a friend in the Water Rat, and together they drift through lazy days in a boat named the Picnic Boat. But the peace of the river bank is threatened when Mr. Toad, wealthy and magnificent and utterly ridiculous, becomes possessed by a motorcar. His obsession brings ruin, prison, and escape, and it falls to his loyal friends to rescue him from himself. Kenneth Grahame built a perfect small world out of English countryside and populated it with characters who feel like old friends from the first page: patient Rat, adventurous Mole, gruff Badger, and Toad, whose magnificent vanity and explosive temper have made him one of the great comic heroes of literature. The Wind in the Willows is a book about friendship that actually earns its tears, about freedom and home and what it means to belong somewhere. It is as funny on the twentieth reading as on the first, and its gentle satire of English country life gives adults something to savor while children simply sail along on the adventure.