At the Back of the North Wind begins with an unnamed, first-person narrator who introduces the idea of the “back of the north wind”: a place so comfortable that, according to Herodotus, the people who lived there could not bear to continue living and drowned themselves. He then introduces a boy named Diamond, named after his coachman father’s favorite horse. Diamond’s family lives in a room above their employer’s coach house on the outskirts of London, but Diamond’s room is in the loft above, where his namesake also sleeps.

Diamond often plays a game in which he tries to get as cold as possible before jumping into bed. While doing so one night, he notices a small hole in his wall. He tries to cover it with a small bundle of hay three times, but each time the cork gets blown out. His mother glues a piece of paper over the hole while Diamond is playing the next morning. That night, Diamond hears a voice that scolds him for “closing up my window” (2). The voice commands Diamond to open the “window,” revealing that it is

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