An Episode of Sparrows: A Virago Modern Classic

Description

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 Catford Street must be to blame. Angela's sister Olivia isn't so sure. She wonders why the neighbourhood children - the 'sparrows' she sometimes watches from her window - have to be locked out of the garden: don't they have a right to enjoy the place too? But nobody has any idea what sends neighbourhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of 'good garden earth'. Still less do they imagine where their investigation will lead them - to a struggling restaurant, a bombed-out church, and, at the heart of it all, a hidden garden.

Rumer Godden (1907-98) was the acclaimed author of over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction for adults and children. Born in England, she and her siblings grew up in Narayanganj, India, and she later spent many years living in Calcutta and Kashmir. Several of her novels were made into films, including Black Narcissus, The Greengage Summer and The River, which was filmed by Jean Renoir. She was appointed OBE in 1993.

It's a masterpiece of construction and utterly, realistically convincing - though it has a fairytale element too. Rumer Godden's books are admired for many qualities . . . but I think her greatest strength is her accurate, unsentimental portrayal of children. Lovejoy, Tip and Sparkey were so real to me that they have stayed alive in my head for more than fifty years . . . An Episode of Sparrows was the first book that made me cry when I was ten. I cried all over again at this recent reading of the story - and I closed the book with the same sense of total satisfaction -- Jacqueline Wilson * New Spectator * 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 * New Yorker * 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 * Extraordinarily gifted writer who manages to infuse her novels with a special magic of their own * Boston Herald * It has a dizzying cast of characters, radiating out from the inhabitants of a once-genteel London residential square to the residents of the teeming commercial streets beyond * Horn Book * A gentle, poignant story, poetically conceived with a fairy godmother ending. Recommended for all * Library Journal *