At the Back of the North Wind

A cabman's son sleeping in a hayloft is visited by North Wind, a woman with hair that can hide a city, who takes him flying over London and then out to where she must sink a ship. MacDonald had been a minister before he was a novelist, and the country at the back of the north wind is not disguised: the book says plainly what it is about. Diamond is called "God's baby" by the neighbours and treated as simple; the reader is left to decide which of them is right. Thirty-nine paintings by artists including John Atkinson Grimshaw and James McNeill Whistler, from 1798 to 1904, range across wrecked boats, London streets and boyhood, matching the novel's voyage through storm and city.