Cooper's books are full of islands, lakes and running water – the river a recurring metaphor for life's inexorable flow. The tide rises and plucks gently at the edge of her garden, covering the track that leads to her house and making her plot an island then the waters retreat, revealing acres of windblown cordgrass. We talk at her kitchen table in the home she built after the death, nine years ago, of her second husband: a white clapboard house on a saltmarsh, facing the Atlantic. The books' inescapable melancholy is partly her own yearning for lost place and time past. 'I remember writing about the snow in The Dark Is Rising with a lizard on my typewriter,' she says.

In 1963 she left Britain to marry an American professor, and all but the first of her Dark Is Rising books were written either in New England or in the house the couple built in the British Virgin Islands. They are anchored in three landscapes: the Thames valley of her upbringing, the Cornish coast of her childhood holidays, and the valley of the Dovey, in Wales, where her mother's family lived – a territory that 'just got hold of me, it was my other home'.Ĭooper is speaking not in any of these places, but in her house on the South Shore of Massachusetts. Together the five stories, which vibrate with echoes of the Arthurian legend, are the most celebrated of her books, deriving much of their power from a meeting of myth and place. It is the second in Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence. It is the story of Will, who, on his 11th birthday, wakes up to find that he can work magic, and steps into the silent snow of a solstice morning to become bound up with the eternal battle between the forces of Dark and Light. To its devotees it is as indelibly linked with Christmas as the pile of presents beneath the tree or carols on the radio.

E very midwinter, as the year dies, there is a ritual in which some grownups, old enough to know better, indulge: we reread Susan Cooper's children's story The Dark Is Rising.

Susan cooper's the dark is rising