Little, Big

Smoky Barnable walks from the City to the town of Edgewood to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater, as instructed, because that is how one arrives. The house he arrives at was designed by her great-grandfather John Drinkwater as a catalogue of architectural styles, each façade a different building, and it is bigger inside than out, and the further in you go the bigger it gets. The Drinkwaters have an arrangement with the fairies, the details of which none of them will state plainly, and everything that happens to the family over five generations is understood to be part of a Tale whose ending nobody has been told. Smoky, an ordinary man who married into it, spends his life on the edge of a story he can never quite enter. Around him: Sophie who sleeps, Auberon who goes to a ruined City and falls in love with a woman named Sylvie, a great-aunt's cards, and a man called Russell Eigenblick who is waking. Crowley writes prose of extraordinary richness and moves at the pace of a season, and the novel is finally about time and loss rather than magic: a family romance in which the fairy tale is what happens to everyone.