George MacDonald's beloved Victorian fairy tale of hidden kingdoms, a thread of moonlight, and the courage of two children:

High in a remote mountain kingdom, eight-year-old Princess Irene lives with her old nurse Lootie in a lonely house while her father the king is away on the frontiers of his realm. The mountains around them are hollow, and within those hollow places live the goblins—creatures of the under-dark who cannot bear the light of the sun and who nurse a long, patient hatred for the people who walk above them.

One rainy evening Irene and Lootie stay out too late, and on the wild hillside they are pursued by shapes that should not exist in daylight's absence. That night Irene discovers a narrow stair she has never seen before, winding up and up inside the house to a tower room where a beautiful, ancient great-great-grandmother sits spinning by a fire of roses—a woman no one else in the house can find, and whom no one else believes in. From her Irene receives a gift beyond price: a fine thread, invisible in the dark, that she must follow without question and without fear, even when it seems to lead where she least wishes to go.

Below in the mines, young Curdie works beside his father hewing coal and iron, and there he learns the goblins' secrets—their weak and ridiculous feet, the songs that drive them into a rage, and the vast conspiracy they are digging beneath the king's own house. When Curdie is taken prisoner in the dark, it falls to a small princess and an impossible thread to walk straight into the goblin realm and bring him home.

First published in 1872 and admired by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton, *The Princess and the Goblin* is one of the founding works of modern fantasy—a luminous, unhurried story of trust, kindness, and the strange courage that grows from believing in what cannot be proved.