Neverwhere
Richard Mayhew, a pleasant and unexceptional Londoner, stops on the sidewalk to help a wounded girl named Door and wakes up the next morning to find he has vanished from his own life, the ATM has forgotten him and his fiancee cannot see him. Door has pulled him into London Below, a hidden city inside the tunnels, sewers, and forgotten stations of the city Above, where he must help her survive the assassins Croup and Vandemar while she investigates who murdered her family. Neil Gaiman wrote the novel from his own BBC miniseries, turning the London Underground map into a mythic geography of earls, marquises, and murder.
Themes & atmosphere
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What you might want to know about Neverwhere
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When Richard Mayhew helps a wounded girl on a London sidewalk, he is erased from London Above and falls into London Below, a city of the lost living under the Underground. He has to help the girl finish her quest to come home.
Yes. Neverwhere originated as a 1996 BBC television series written by Neil Gaiman, who then expanded the script into the novel. Both versions were released in 1996. Gaiman has since released a preferred Author's Preferred Text edition.
Neverwhere is largely standalone, but Gaiman has written a sequel novella, How the Marquis Got His Coat Back, published in the Trigger Warning collection. A direct novel sequel has been long-discussed but not produced.
Neverwhere was written by Neil Gaiman, published in 1996 by AST.
Neverwhere is 388 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Neverwhere takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Neverwhere is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.