Avilion
core novel 2009 Mythago Wood
Record
| First published | 2009 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.94 (358 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 384 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780575083028 |
| Internal chronology | 5 |
Synopsis
Avilion returns to the Huxley family at the heart of the Mythago Wood cycle, following Steven Huxley, now years on from his own earlier journey into Ryhope Wood, as he and his family confront the forest's continuing hold over their lives. With his children growing up in the shadow of the wood's mythic power and its history of drawing family members into its depths, Steven must reckon with both the legacy of his brother Christian's fate and the wood's ongoing capacity to generate mythagos, the archetypal figures born from human imagination that have shaped the family's story since the first novel. The book brings the cycle's decades-spanning exploration of the Huxley family's relationship with Ryhope Wood toward its culmination, following a new generation into the forest's mythic depths.
Where it sits
- Universe: Mythago Wood
- Series: The Mythago Wood Cycle core; position 5 of 5 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert Holdstock
Notes
- From the series record (The Mythago Wood Cycle): The 5 Ryhope Wood novels. Mythago Wood (1984) is registered under its full-novel first-publication year, not the 1981 novella version that originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (expanded into the novel Holdstock actually intends as the series' true text) -- the same discipline applied under this project's textual-integrity rule elsewhere. Internal chronology among Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn and the others is left unpopulated (null), the same treatment used elsewhere for disputed or unrecorded chronologies: sources describe its events as substantially concurrent with/interleaved across the cycle rather than a clean linear slot, and Holdstock's own cycle page does not assert one; the other 4 novels' internal chronology values track publication order, which is the settled default for the rest of the cycle.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Mythago Wood Cycle: position 5 of 5: previous Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997)
- Internal chronology, within Mythago Wood: position 4 of 4: previous The Hollowing (1993)
Sources
← Mythago Wood dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.