A Prisoner in Fairyland

A businessman with a childhood he never quite left goes to a Swiss valley, where a family of children and a cousin who writes stories persuade him that the stars can be gathered up and used. Algernon Blackwood believed most of it: he had spent years in Canada and New York in poverty and turned to the mystical for a way out. It is the least frightening thing he wrote and the one he liked best. Fifty-nine plates, from Munch to Emma Sandys, gather gardens, spring light and quiet portraits that echo the book's own gathering of stars.