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An Episode of Sparrows

An Episode of Sparrows

Current price: $18.95
Publication Date: October 31st, 2004
Publisher:
New York Review of Books
ISBN:
9781590171240
Pages:
247
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Description

A much-loved English novel reminiscent of The Secret Garden

Someone has dug up the private garden in the square and taken buckets of dirt, and Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street must be to blame. But Angela's sister Olivia isn't so sure. Olivia wonders why the neighborhood children--the "sparrows" she sometimes watches from the window of her house --have to be locked out of the garden. Don't they have a right to enjoy the place, too? But neither Angela nor Olivia has any idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of "good, garden earth." Still less do they imagine where their investigation of the incident will lead them--to a struggling restaurant, a bombed-out church, and at the heart of it all, a hidden garden.

About the Author

Rumer Godden (1907-1998) grew up in India, where her father ran a steamship company. When her husband left her penniless in Calcutta with two daughters to raise, she started to write books to pay off her many debts. She wrote more than sixty books for adults and young adults, including The Doll's House, Impunity Jane, The Greengage Summer, An Episode of Sparrows and The Mousewife.

Praise for An Episode of Sparrows

"It would be impossible for a reader not to feel better from reading the story…her rich understanding of human nature, her humor and her beautiful prose inevitably leave one aglow."
Chicago Tribune

"…an extraordinarily gifted writer who manages to infuse her novels with a special magic of their own."
Boston Herald

"May well prove the book of the year for those who are not ashamed to weep over the printed page…author Godden here tries her deft writing hand at landscaping a child’s heart."
Time

"It is a sentimental tale, well told, with an unlikely and entirely satisfactory ending."
The New Yorker

"It has a dizzying cast of characters, radiating out from the inhabitants of a once-gentel London residential square to the residents of the teeming commercial streets beyond."
The Horn Book

A gentle, poignant story, poetically conceived with a fairy godmother ending. Recommended for all…
— Library Journal