The Wind in the Willows
A mole leaves his underground house, discovers a river, and falls in with a water rat, a badger and a toad whose enthusiasm for motor cars keeps getting him into trouble. Grahame wrote the book from stories he told his son, and the prose is more careful than that origin suggests.
The famous chapter, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is a mystical interlude that many children skip and many adults return to. The book is a celebration of friendship and of a particular English landscape, and it is also a quiet argument about how to live: stay home, keep your house, help your friends.
Public-domain status
First published in 1908. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Kenneth Grahame died in 1932, so this work has been free to republish there since 2003.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 289 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894
- Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894
- Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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