The Stone Book Quartet
The Stone Book Quartet, or Stone Book series, is a set of four short novels by Alan Garner and published by William Collins, Sons, from 1976 to 1978. Set in eastern Cheshire, they feature one day each in the life of four generations of Garner's family and they span more than a century. In a 1989 interview he called them "four very short novels which hang together as one work, called The Stone Book Quartet, where again I write about Alderley Edge, luminously but not magically." The allusion is to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequels (1960, 1963, 2012), which concern the locale of Alderley Edge, although not the village itself. ISFDB calls them the Alderley series. In the same interview he called the work "exhausting" but "the most rewarding of everything" he'd done to date. The four books were first published by Collins in hardcover editions of 270 pages in sum. The Stone Book (1976, ) Tom Fobble's Day (1977, 0-00-184832-1) — the last of four in narrative sequence Granny Reardun (1977, 0-00-184288-9) The Aimer Gate (1978, 0-00-184067-3) One year after The Aimer Gate, Collins published a 172-page omnibus entitled The Stone Book Quartet (1979, 9780006551515) and subsequent