Phantastes

On the morning after his twenty-first birthday, a young man named Anodos wakes to find the stream from his washbasin running across his carpet and his bedroom turning into a wood: he has crossed into Fairy Land. Following a path into the forest, he meets the friendly spirits of the trees and the treacherous Alder-maiden, opens a forbidden door and gains a shadow that withers whatever it falls on, reads strange tales in a palace of the fairies, sings a marble lady to life and loses her, and learns at last, through failure and death, that the way to find himself is to lose himself in love. MacDonald's first romance is the book that a young atheist named C. S. Lewis bought at a railway bookstall in 1916, and later said had baptized his imagination.