Published in 1968, a time when descriptive writing wasn't so often dismissed as unnecessary filler, the book's style is simply gorgeous, combining simile and metaphor with fairy tale language and emotional honesty into true word painting. The first and most obvious thing about The Last Unicorn, is that the book is as much poetry as prose. Gathering companions along the way such as Schmendrick, the world’s worst magician, and Molly Grue, a lady looking for a new life, the unicorn will confront monsters both human and inhuman, becoming the object of greed, avarice and even love, and find that ultimately the only way of avoiding the terrifying fate that has befallen the rest of her kindred is to change her unchangeable self. All this changes however when she overhears a hunter in her wood describing her as the last unicorn in the world, and sets out to find out what has become of the rest of her kind. She doesn't think to question anything, because unicorns just are. The unicorn has lived alone longer than she can remember, taking her endless time as it comes, walking beneath the summer trees of her wood, blessing the land with her presence, and occasionally letting herself be glimpsed by mortals. Fortunately, one of the happier consequences for me of the digital revolution is an access to media, both audiobooks and animated, that I hadn't experienced before, so this is a lack we can easily fix, and (as indeed several characters in this book prove), one is never too old for tales about unicorns. After all, as a fantasy loving child of the eighties I should at least have seen the animated film, even if the usual bugbear lack of audio availability, kept me from reading the novel that inspired it.

I'm quite honestly surprised I haven't come across Peter S Beagle's The Last Unicorn before now.

The lost unicorn book