The work was first published on 18 June 2013 through William Morrow and Company and follows an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers events that began forty years earlier.

[2] The illustrated edition of the work was published on 5 November 2019, featuring the artwork of Australian fine artist Elise Hurst.

There he revisits the area in which he and his sister grew up and remembers a young girl named Lettie Hempstock, who had claimed that the pond behind her house was an ocean.

He stops at the house where Lettie had lived with her mother and grandmother and encounters a member of her family and starts to remember forgotten incidents from the past.

Unwilling to believe that there could be anything in the world that could harm her, Ursula is attacked and eliminated by "hunger birds", entities that serve a purpose similar to scavengers.

[9] The New York Times gave a positive review for The Ocean at the End of the Lane, commenting that the book would appeal to multiple age groups.

[10] USA Today stated that the novel was thematically similar to Gaiman's 2002 children's novel Coraline and the 2005 film MirrorMask in that the enemy is "closer than they might think", which "makes his monsters that much more sinister when a woman like Ursula is just downstairs".

[12] The novel was adapted for the stage by the writer Joel Horwood and director Katy Rudd in 2019, after first contacting Gaiman three years earlier.

[22] Henry Selick, who called The Ocean at the End of the Lane "Neil Gaiman's best book", made an attempt to adapt it into a stop-motion animated feature, and wrote a 50 pages script.

[24] In August 2024, Selick implied the project was back in limbo, saying in an interview while promoting the theatrical re-release of Coraline, "I would hope that it might still come together, but I have no predictions.

"[25] In January that year, Selick is still making his The Ocean at the End of the Lane feature film, which is still in development while all the women accusing Gaiman of sexual assault.

[26] In Portsmouth, UK, where Gaiman's family had a chain of grocery stores, a short connecting stretch of road is officially named The Ocean at the End of the Lane.