The Wonderful Visit

When a country vicar accidentally shoots down an angel who has strayed from the Land of Dreams, the bewildered celestial visitor is taken into the vicarage, where his innocence exposes the cruelty, hypocrisy, and absurdity of ordinary English village life. Wells’s whimsical early fantasy uses the angel’s outsider eyes to satirize humanity with gentle irony and growing poignancy. Part fairy tale, part social comedy, part tragedy, The Wonderful Visit is a charming and thoughtful fable about beauty and goodness colliding with a narrow world. Light yet pointed, it reveals the imaginative playfulness and moral seriousness that run through all of Wells’s work.