The Wind in the Willows (Bulgarian edition)

The Wind in the Willows (Japanese edition)

The Wind in the Willows, the story of four animals and their adventures in the idyllic English countryside, started out as bedtime stories Grahame would tell his son. He eventually started writing them down, and finally produced this much-loved childrens classic. In continuous print since 1908, The Wind in the Willows has been illustrated countless times and adapted to stage, radio, and screen. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible."

The Willows is one of Blackwood's best known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible." - Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. After managing to land their canoe for the evening, during the night and into the next day and night, the mysterious, hostile forces emerge in force, including large, dark shapes that seem to trace the consciousness of the two men… Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre.

Follow Toad Rat Badger Mole and their many friends as they are "simply messing about in boats." And join them as they have one adventure after another. Rich compelling and exciting there's something here for the entire family.

The Wind in the Willows Tales from the Riverbank Kenneth Grahame Illustrated by Paul Bransom The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley. In 1908, Grahame retired from his position as secretary of the Bank of England. He moved back to Cookham, Berkshire, where he had been brought up and spent his time by the River Thames doing much as the animal characters in his book do--namely, as one of the phrases from the book says, "simply messing about in boats"--and wrote down the bed-time stories he had been telling his son Alistair. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, wrote to Grahame to tell him that he had "read it and reread it, and have come to accept the characters as old friends". The novel was in its thirty-first printing when playwright A. A. Milne adapted a part of it for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall in 1929. In 2003, The Wind in the Willows was listed at number 16 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.