“Little, Big” by John Crowley continues to be my very favorite novel in any genre. 
I recall when I found this book the summer after my freshman year at Michigan in the basement of Dawn Treader book shop on East University (long since closed). The beauty and clarity of Crowley’s language, ideas, and characters were wonderful, and I felt somehow (Somehow?) transformed by reading it.
I have reread this book several times since then, and it continues to have a powerful effect every time I turn again to it. Although the genre is fantasy, the book defies easy categorization. It blends elements of fantasy, myth, and historical fiction, and romance in a modern novel form, and is underpinned by Crowley’s unsurpassed craft of language, metaphor, and meaning. The very words that Crowley uses are beautiful and tender and are wonderful to hear when read aloud. This is one of the books that make me cry every time I finish reading it. I guess I really am a sentimental bastard when it comes down to it. Alas.
While the book ostensibly moves around the encounter of the Drinkwater family with Faeries, this is no children’s story, and the characters and themes are mature, nuanced, and complex. This is very much a “fairy story for adults”. Crowley’s characters are deftly and carefully drawn, and the novel is long and complicated enough that it becomes difficult to part with each of them as the novel draws to its beautiful and inevitable close.
I simply cannot say enough about this book. It is in reprint, and should be reasonably easy to find.
The last paragraphs are often-quoted and cited by those who study contemporary literature, but lose no power in their repetition:
One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house once made of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summery day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.
