Little, Big

Little, Big is a fantasy novel by the American writer John Crowley, published in 1981 under the fuller title Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament. It won the World Fantasy Award in 1982.

The architect John Drinkwater becomes convinced that the world is nested, that inside this one there is another, and inside that another still, each larger than the world that contains it, with the realm of Faerie towards the centre. His wife Violet Bramble, who is English, can see and talk with the fairies. He collects his thinking in a book he goes on rewriting, called The Architecture of Country Houses.

Drinkwater designs and builds Edgewood, a house north of New York City made of many styles laid over and across one another, ostensibly as a sampler for prospective clients. Visitors find it disorienting, the family finds it protective, and it turns out to be a way into the country beyond. The story opens long after Drinkwater and his wife have died, when their great-granddaughter Daily Alice falls in love with a stranger called Smoky Barnable, and he begins to work out what her family has been living beside.