A Green and Ancient Light

A gorgeous fantasy in the spirit of Pan’s Labyrinth and John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things.

Set in a world that might be our own, during a war that evokes our shared cultural memory of World War II, The Sacred Woods is the story of one summer in the life of a boy sent to stay with his grandmother, in an idyllic fishing village away from the front. Their tranquility is shattered by the crash of a bullet-riddled enemy plane, the arrival of a mysterious friend of Grandmother’s named Mr. Girandole, who knows the true story of Cinderella’s slipper, and the discovery of a riddle in the (some say haunted, others sacred) grove of ruins behind Grandmother’s house. In a setting that is at once sumptuously serene and overshadowed by the specter of war, four unlikely allies learn the values of courage and sacrifice.