At the Back of the North Wind

Diamond is a coachman’s son, named after his father’s favourite horse, and he sleeps in a loft above the stables, where the hay is warm but the wind blows keenly. One night, he is visited by a beautiful lady whose black hair fills the room: the North Wind herself.

Sweeping Diamond up in her hair, she takes him to a series of marvellous destinations, from a cathedral where the Apostles come alive, to a country at the back of the North Wind. As they travel across the skies, North Wind reveals her awesome force and her power to destroy as well as mend, yet Diamond never loses his faith in her. Through his journeys he grows in patience and goodness, helping his mother and father, and others around them, through illness and poverty – until North Wind’s final plans for them are revealed.

C. S. Lewis has acknowledged his great debt to MacDonald’s writing, and W. H. Auden called him ‘one of the most remarkable writers of the 19th century.’ George MacDonald himself declared that he did not write for children ‘but for the childlike whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five’. His touching and powerful fable, with its spiritual learning lightly worn, continues to work its magic on readers young and old.