By the author of Black Narcissus

With a foreword by JACQUELINE WILSON

‘A masterpiece of construction and utterly realistically convincing…Rumer Godden’s writing is 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’ Jacqueline Wilson

A captivating classic novel of a poor girl striving to create beauty among the bombsites of post-war London.

Someone has been digging up the private garden in the Square. Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a gang of local boys is to blame, but her sister, Olivia, isn’t so sure. She wonders why the neighbourhood children – ‘sparrows’, she calls them – have to be locked out: don’t they have a right to enjoy the garden too?

Nobody has any idea what sends 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.