Lavondyss
core novel 1988 Mythago Wood
Record
| First published | 1988 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.96 (2,469 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 414 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780575043749 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
Lavondyss, a direct sequel to Mythago Wood, ventures deeper into Ryhope Wood, following Tallis Keeton, a young girl with an unusual sensitivity to the wood's mythic power, as she searches for her brother Harry, who vanished into the forest under mysterious circumstances. Tallis's search draws her toward Lavondyss, the wood's remote, ice-age heart, a realm even further removed from ordinary time and reality than the mythago-inhabited outer forest explored in the first novel. As she journeys inward, Tallis must contend with the wood's ability to generate mythagos, archetypal myth-figures given physical form out of the collective human unconscious, while confronting truths about her own connection to the forest's ancient power that reshape her understanding of both her brother's disappearance and her own nature.
Where it sits
- Universe: Mythago Wood
- Series: The Mythago Wood Cycle core; position 2 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 2 of 5: previous Mythago Wood (1984) · next The Hollowing (1993)
- Internal chronology, within Mythago Wood: position 2 of 4: previous Mythago Wood (1984) · next The Hollowing (1993)
Sources
← Mythago Wood dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.