De kleine Johannes

"Het lijkt veel op een sprookje, maar het is allemaal echt gebeurd," the narrator promises, and the book keeps that fairy-tale bargain with a straight face: an elf king's feast in a rabbit hole, a melancholy glowworm grieving a love lost to humankind, and crickets at their school lessons mocking everything people think they know. Frederik van Eeden writes in long, luminous sentences full of light and water and gold — white lilies on the pond, the sea meeting a strip of blinding red under the sun — and lets the natural world speak in its own voice.

But Windekind offers Johannes a choice: an eternal life of wandering with the elves and seasons, if he will forsake his father, his dog, his room, and all of humanity. And a wise old gnome named Wistik plants a more dangerous longing still, the desire for a mythical book that would explain all of existence. That hunger leads on to stranger guides and a grim city, where enchantment gives way to the harder question of what it costs to remain a human being.

Johannes wakes on the dune to find a small golden key glinting in his open hand, unsure himself what was dream and what was real. The way forward from there is his to find.