Phantastes

On the morning after his twenty-first birthday, Anodos finds his bedroom dissolving into an enchanted forest, and so begins a wandering through Fairy Land that follows the shape of a dream rather than a plot. He falls in love with a woman of marble he sings to life, loses her, and is trailed by a dark shadow that drains the wonder from everything it touches. MacDonald fills the woods with singing trees, treacherous ogres, and doors that open onto other lives. C.S. Lewis said the book baptized his imagination, and generations of fantasy writers have traced their roots back to it. Read it less for what happens than for the mood it leaves behind. Download the free PDF and EPUB edition.