At the Back of the North Wind

At the Back of the North Wind is a children's book by the Scottish writer George MacDonald, published in book form in 1871 after appearing in a magazine.

Diamond is the son of a London coachman, and he sleeps in the loft above the horses because the family has no room for him anywhere else. He is kind in the way of a child who has not yet learned to be anything else, and he brings out the same quality in almost everybody he meets. The North Wind comes to him as a woman who is beautiful when she is gentle and terrible when she is not, and she carries him over the city and out onto the open sea, where he sees what she does to ships at her worst. MacDonald uses the travels to say something about death and about what a child notices that adults have stopped seeing, and the book is told in episodes, one of which, Little Daylight, has often been printed separately as a fairy tale.

The story was serialised from 1868 and appeared as a novel in 1871, and later writers of fantasy for children have cited it more often than almost any other book of its period.