Can you remember the first time you fell in love with a book? A Sunday Times Irish Times
Financial Times Independent Daily Mail TLS Economist Prospect Evening Standard and
New Statesman Book of the Year 2024 The perfect Christmas gift for booklovers 'A MARVEL'
PHILIP PULLMAN The stories we read as children matter. The best ones are indelible in our
memories reaching far beyond our childhoods they are a window into our deepest hopes joys
and anxieties. They reveal our past - collective and individual remembered and imagined - and
invite us to dream up different futures. In a pioneering history of the children's literary
canon The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading from the ancient tales of Aesop
through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics. Excavating the complex lives of
our most beloved writers Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the
power of books to inspire and console entire generations. *** 'A DELIGHT' JULIA
DONALDSON 'A JOY' MICHAEL ROSEN 'GLORIOUSLY ENTERTAINING' TOM HOLLAND