Written and set in the nineteen-fifties, I’m not surprised it remains in print seventy years later. Barbara Sleigh writes deftly, weaving her plot as cunningly as a witch’s garland, and as discreetly. She manages to make magic both magic and ordinary. It fits convincingly into Rosemary’s world of quiet getting by in a flat with…
What a delight! David Almond’s typically powerful and subtle writing, beautifully enhanced by Laura Carlin’s artwork. The whole book sings. Mysterious Nanty Solo comes to town. A Pied Piper who is not abductor, but liberator. She frees the children and the children free the adults. Happy town. Buy through Bookshop.org
‘It’ is the Psammead, a gloriously grumpy sand fairy – and anything less fairylike in looks is hard to imagination, and all part of the great inclusive sweep of E. Nesbit’s arm as she draws you into her story – grants a wish a day. Each vanishes at sunset and each brings a whole heap…
Ajay and his friends are the abandoned orphans of Mumbai station and children of the nearby slums. He is a boy with ambition and a mission and nothing and no one is going to stop him. Watch out world, here comes Ajay! His mother’s pen is all he has of her, and with it he…
I like this book: there’s a warmth and delicacy here. But it and almost all of the books by this Finnish emigre to Canada are now out of print. It was published in 1964 and illustrated by the prolific and foxy Edward Ardizzone. Foxy, because for me there’s a mystery about his work; it is…
I suppose we might say that the Iron Man is Ted Hughes himself, the strong man who fell off a cliff and broke into pieces, but then painstakingly found the pieces and bolted them back together. Eating tractors and cars and barbed wire, he sought to eat up the modern world and let something more…
A short tale, copiously and sensitively illustrated by Ben Shahn, of the Prague ghetto in the 1550s. A Christian boy is discarded by his master in settlement of a debt to become the servant of one those terrible Jews whose black souls the Devil will have when they die. Except, to his awakening astonishment, his…
Published in the USA in 1949 and then out of print for many years, some wise person at Enchanted Lions Books decide to reissue it in 2013. Son of Mr and Mrs Brown, Little Boy Brown is four and a half. He tells his own story of a day out, and how cleverly and with…
Perhaps this is a little more like the kind of book you might expect on a site with this name. Certainly here is an angel, an angel who is suitably mysterious. And an angel who brings about a kind of miracle, for Lewis has a dodgy leg and wants to be like the other kids….
