A young man wakes on his twenty-first birthday to find his bedroom turning into a forest, and walks through Fairy Land shadowed by a double he cannot shake off. MacDonald called it a faerie romance for men and women, not for children, and C. S. Lewis said reading it at sixteen baptised his imagination. Nothing is explained and little is resolved; what the book offers instead is the sensation of a dream that means something, held for three hundred pages. Forty plates by painters including Shishkin and Kittelsen follow the same path, pine woods, pools and phantom figures that shadow the young man's dream.
