Little, Big
A multigenerational saga of the Drinkwater family and their relationship with Faerie, told in prose of extraordinary beauty. The world gets larger the further in you go. Crowley wrote the most literary fantasy novel of the 20th century.
The pacing is glacial, long stretches where almost nothing happens and the prose does the work plot normally would, one reader saying Crowley “forgot that a plot was actually necessary.” The “clever language is often stilted and ponderously slow,” and the ambiguity fans praise tips into confusion for others, who lose track of who they are following. Beautiful sentences wrap around characters who stay thin and cold across four generations. A reader who tried three times flags an intermarriage thread that is never motivated and a dated handling of the few non-white characters. And one critic calls it “a betrayal of nearly all its promises.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
