The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The narrator of this little book has returned to his childhood home in England to attend a family funeral. He starts to remember something odd about his childhood that he had forgotten, something about a girl he befriended, a girl named Lettie who claimed the pond behind her farm was actually an ocean. When an opal-miner renting a room at his house steals the family car and commits suicide, a monster is brought into the world. Only Lettie can stop it from destroying the narrator and his family, and save the world. This is Gaiman at his best. Hard to put down!