The Wind in the Willows

When Mole flings down his spring-cleaning and scrambles up into the sunlight, he stumbles into a new life on the riverbank and a friendship with the easy, generous Water Rat, who lives for messing about in boats. Around their companionship Kenneth Grahame builds one of the most loved worlds in English literature — a green, slow-flowing country of picnics and poetry, of warm burrows and the fearful dark of the Wild Wood.

But the riverbank's peace is forever being upset by the most famous of its inhabitants: Mr. Toad of Toad Hall, rich, charming, and wholly incapable of resisting his latest craze. When Toad falls madly in love with the motor-car, his friends Rat, Mole, and the formidable old Badger must try to save him from himself — through theft, imprisonment, a hair-raising escape, and at last a pitched battle to win back his ancestral home.

Between the comedy runs something quieter and stranger: the lyrical beauty of the river through the turning seasons, the deep comfort of home, the wanderer's longing for the open road, and — in the celebrated chapter The Piper at the Gates of Dawn — a hush of pure wonder at the natural world. Grahame wrote the book for his small son, out of bedtime stories and holiday letters, and something of that intimacy has never left it.

Tender, funny, and shot through with a love of the English countryside on the brink of a faster age, The Wind in the Willows remains a book for every reader torn between the safety of home and the call of the road. More than a hundred years on, it is as fresh as the morning the Mole first came up into the sun.