In the first days of spring in ancient Greece, the faun Coix falls for the most terribly beautiful creature he’s ever beheld: the shepherd’s daughter Iole. Despite Coix’s best efforts, she chooses a mere human over him. Heartbroken and determined to win her back, Coix begs the god Pan to change him into a human so he can love Iole as she wants to be loved. But when he gets his wish, Coix awakens without his memory—and without Iole. Eden Phillpotts’s classical fantasy will whisk you away to a world where shepherdesses are fair, gods wax philosophical, and where a lesson is always learned in the nick of time.
“[From this book’s paradise, the writer] can lay on his back, weave dreams of fancy, and watch with a gentle irony the metamorphoses of gods and men.”
—The Saturday Review, 1926
Eden Phillpotts was born in India in 1862, but hailed from the United Kingdom from his early childhood forward. Known as a prolific young adult and mystery novelist, he penned about 250 works in his lifetime, including The Farmer’s Wife, a comic play which Alfred Hitchcock later directed as a silent film. Later in his career, he explored his modern philosophy in a wealth of fantasy and early science-fiction novels.