The mind-altering miracle of the novel in Britain, from A to Z
From our UK edition
The jacket design of this splendid book shows Lewis Carroll’s Alice pulling back a curtain to reveal the door into Wonderland. In the original story, it leads to ‘a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole’, at the end of which Alice notices ‘the loveliest garden you ever saw’. She is too large to squeeze through this doorway, but questions whether she might be able to defy the laws of physics and get into the garden anyway; after all, she tells herself, so many curious things have happened to her already that it seems ‘very few things indeed were really impossible’. It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for reading a work of fiction.
