Little, Big

On a June day, a young man named Smoky Barnable walks on foot from the City to a place called Edgewood to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater. Smoky, raised in anonymity by an elderly father who gave him a classical education but no formal schooling, has spent his life as a near-invisible presence. His life changed when George Mouse, a friend from an old City family, introduced him to country cousins at a party, where Smoky met Alice, a tall woman with red-gold hair. They fell in love at first sight, and Smoky felt his lifelong anonymity cured, as though Alice made him solid and real.

That he must walk is a condition set by Great-aunt Cloud, the family's eldest member, who reads a unique deck called the Least Trumps: cards depicting Persons, Places, Things, and Notions rather than the standard tarot. Smoky arrives at Edgewood, a vast house built in the 1890s by Alice's great-grandfather John Drinkwater, a Beaux-Arts architect who collapsed several houses of different styles into one structure that shifts in appearance as one walks around it. In the library, Smoky discovers the final edition of Drinkwater's The Architecture of Country Houses, containing a complex folded chart he cannot decipher, and a photograph that appears to show a small winged elf beside the family.

The novel reaches back to the previous century to explain how Edgewood came to border another world. John Drinkwater, during a spiritual crisis, traveled to England and met Violet Bramble. Violet's father was an eccentric mystic who lectured on "elementals," beings inhabiting an "infundibular" world whose interior grows larger the deeper one penetrates. Violet, who had genuine experience of these beings, was exploited by her father as a medium. John rescued her, brought her to America, and built Edgewood for her. There, Violet visited Mrs. Underhill, a tiny, ancient fairy woman living beneath a knoll where an oak and a thorn grew together. Mrs. Underhill told Violet that the Tale, the long destiny binding the family to the fairy world, was the longest she knew, and that Violet's descendants would all be buried before it was told.

Smoky and Alice marry on Midsummer Day on a lake island. Sophie Drinkwater, Alice's sister, perceives in a dream that unseen fairy beings watch the consummation. On their honeymoon, Smoky stumbles into an enchanted cottage where Mrs. Underhill tells him his marriage will bring happiness "yes and no" because it is "all part of the Tale." When he emerges, he holds only a hornet's nest. During their absence, Alice's great-uncle Auberon dies. Alice's father, Doctor Drinkwater, suggests Smoky become the community's schoolteacher. Smoky reflects that he is probably "a minor character in someone else's story."

The second book leaps back to the 1920s. After John Drinkwater's death, Violet retreated upstairs. Her youngest son August bargained with a speaking kingfisher for "power over women" in exchange for Violet's stolen card deck. The power proved a curse: August fell helplessly in love with every woman he met, fathering children across the five surrounding towns before vanishing into the woods, apparently to drown himself. His pregnant lover Amy Meadows arrived at Edgewood; the child, John Storm, grew up to become the Doctor Drinkwater whom Smoky later knows. The stolen cards were returned but altered, now predicting only small daily events. Violet instructed her daughter Nora, later Cloud, to keep silence about the fairies, never to tell, and yet to trust.

Years pass. Smoky teaches; Alice bears three daughters, Tacey, Lily, and Lucy, and a son, Auberon. Sophie becomes pregnant by George Mouse, though Smoky is allowed to believe the child is his. The baby, Lilac, is stolen on the winter solstice by fairy beings who replace her with a changeling. Sophie does not wake.

The third book jumps forward 25 years. Auberon Barnable, Smoky and Alice's son, arrives in the City to seek his fortune as a writer. At George Mouse's Old Law Farm, an urban commune, he meets Sylvie, a vivacious Puerto Rican woman with a Destiny prophesied in childhood that she does not understand. They fall in love. Meanwhile, a secretive cabal called the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club hires Ariel Hawksquill to investigate Russell Eigenblick, a charismatic lecturer whose growing influence alarms them. Hawksquill practices the Art of Memory, a mnemonic system using imaginary architectural spaces to store knowledge. She determines that Eigenblick is the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, said to sleep beneath a mountain until needed, now awakened by the fairies as their champion.

The real Lilac, raised in the fairy realm by Mrs. Underhill, tours the mortal world on a stork's back and mischievously shouts "Wake up!" at her sleeping mother, stealing Sophie's ability to sleep for decades. Young Auberon, growing up at Edgewood, tries to uncover the family's fairy secrets but gives up. His imaginary friend Lilac, modeled unconsciously on the stolen baby, vanishes when he chases her into the woods, marking the end of his childhood.

Sylvie disappears without warning, and Auberon's search destroys him. He becomes homeless and develops an alcohol addiction, accompanied by Fred Savage, an eccentric messenger who becomes his protector. Auberon sees phantom Sylvies conjured by the fairies "to keep him sharp set." Hawksquill teaches him the Art of Memory in a park his ancestor built, and Auberon distributes every detail of Sylvie across its pathways and statues, but exorcises nothing. Lilac appears to him, still a child, and tells him it is time to go home.

At Edgewood, Auberon and Smoky finally speak honestly. Smoky confesses he never believed in fairies; Auberon confesses he never knew anything. Each had been hiding a shared ignorance from the other.

In the final book, Eigenblick has become President, ushering in years of brutal winter and social collapse. Sophie senses only 52 fairy beings remain. Lilac wakes from her enchanted sleep and walks barefoot through the snow to Edgewood, telling Sophie that a Parliament must be held at Midsummer to end the War, or the fairies will be lost and winter will never end. The house, she says, is the door.

Sophie assembles the extended family. Smoky asks how they would get back; Sophie's silence provides the answer. Daily Alice tells Sophie she must go first, because without her there will be no place for the others to reach. At dawn, Alice steps through the front door and journeys toward the knoll where Mrs. Underhill's house stands empty, its duties now hers.

On Midsummer Day, Smoky refuses to go, saying he never belonged to the Tale, but when Lilac appears and Sophie introduces her as his daughter, his resistance collapses. Smoky has a shattering attack of angina in which he glimpses a revelation: The Tale is behind them, not ahead; the destination is the place they already are. Eigenblick boards a train that vanishes into a lightless tunnel, passing into legend. Sylvie arrives at a banquet in the woods and finds Auberon waiting. The feast is simultaneously a wake for Smoky and a wedding for Auberon and Sylvie. Daily Alice arrives "like daybreak" and sends them to the four corners of a kingdom made new. The lights of Edgewood go out one by one over the seasons, and the house becomes a ruin, but the story of the lit, empty house travels far, "for stories last longer; but only by becoming only stories."