Over Sea, Under Stone is the first novel in the five-volume "The Dark Is Rising" sequence by British author Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper

Susan Mary Cooper is an English author best known for The Dark Is Rising, an award-winning five-volume saga set in and around England and Wales. The books incorporate traditional British mythology, such as Arthurian and other Welsh elements with original material ; these books were adapted into a...

. It was first published in London by Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

 in 1965. It tells of the three Drew children: Simon, Jane and Barney, and their holiday to Cornwall. The story has more of the character of a mystery than the later novels in the sequence, with the traditional fantasy elements only being hinted at and those references only later in the narrative.