Tortoise By Candlelight

'It is a small book, acute, discreet and tender; it is also written with warm care and considerable taste - all qualities too easily overlooked' KIRKUS REVIEWS'An exceptional picture of disorganised family life' OBSERVER'Bawden is noted too for the sharp sense of humour that edges her tales of middle-class manners and mores towards satire, particularly when it all goes wrong' GUARDIAN With the ferocity of a mother tiger defending her cubs, fourteen-year-old Emmie Bean watches over her household: her amiable drunken father, her gaunt, evangelical old grandmother, her beautiful, wayward sister Alice and most precious of all, eight-year-old Oliver, who has the countenance of an angel and the ethical sense of a cobra. But with the arrival of new neighbours, the outside world intrudes into the isolated privacy of family life and Emmie's kingdom is no longer secure. Combining the guile of a young child with the desperation of adolescence, Emmie fights to stave off the changes- and the revelations- that growing up necessarily brings. Powerful, heart-rending, but never sentimental, Tortoise by Candlelight is a captivating excursion into the landscape of youth.