Speaking of characters, I admired the way that nobody here is quite what they seem on the surface. Also, like Gaiman, Beagle is able to switch subject matter and apply his descriptive gifts equally to the fantastic, horrific or even the mundane, able to show how flawed, human and frequently even plane characters such as Molly were, yet never be dismissive of their qualities, making their very flaws something almost admirable. Despite the very protagonist and title character of the novel being a fantastic creature whose wonder and beauty is a major point in the story, it's a testament to Beagle's skills as a wordsmith that I never felt his descriptions of the unicorn's unearthly appearance became overly florid. Also like Gaiman, Beagle is able to drift from the mundane, to the fantastic, to the terrifying with consummate ease. It is easy to see why writers such as Patrick Rothfuss and Neil Gaiman count Beagle's book as a favourite citing it as a heavy influence in their own work. 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 last unicorn paperback