Fairy fruit is being smuggled into Dorimare.

Lud-in-the-Mist, the highly influential early fantasy novel you’ve never heard of, but praised by numerous authors throughout the years. Originally published in 1926. In its main character, Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, Mirrlees prefigures Bilbo by a decade, in a setting not unlike Hobbiton. More recently the book’s influence has been felt most strongly in works such as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It is the story of Lud-in-the-Mist in Dorimare, a small, sleepy and unimaginative town that borders the land of Fairy, but has cut itself off from completely for hundreds of years. Fairy fruit which sends men mad is now being smuggled in and given to children, old mysteries are dug up, and it is up to Master Nathaniel to get to the bottom of it all.

Neil Gaiman describes Lud-in-the-Mist as a little golden miracle of a book. Jo Walton says it is beautifully written, charming, funny, and always just a little creepy , and Lin Carter paints it as sturdy as a painting by Breughel, as delicate as the breath of a hummingbird’s wing. Michael Swanwick says it’s diffuse influence runs like a scarlet thread through the body of serious fantasy today.

This new edition also includes Hope Mirrlees’s other influential, very modernist, piece of writing: Paris, a Poem, originally published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf through their own Hogarth Press.