Child that Books Built
'Anyone who reads or ever read children's books - read this. It's a joy.' Irish Times
'Exhilarating.' New York Times Book Review
'Sublime.' Peter Ackroyd, The Times
** An Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Guardian and Irish Times Book of the Year. **
What would you find if you went back and re-read your favourite books from childhood?
In The Child That Books Built Francis Spufford revisits all those childhood obsessions: fairy tales; Where the Wild Things Are; The Lord of the Rings; The Chronicles of Narnia; Little House on the Prairie; The Wind in the Willows; The Earthsea Trilogy and more. In these treasured tales Francis Spufford discovers both delight and sadness - the thrill as worlds of imagination opened up before him mixed with the memories of a boy who retreated into books when faced with a family tragedy.
Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997), has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. His second, The Child That Books Built, gave Neil Gaiman 'the peculiar feeling that there was now a book I didn't need to write'. His third, Backroom Boys, was called 'as nearly perfect as makes no difference' by the Daily Telegraph and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize.
His fourth, Red Plenty was called 'odd, brilliant and crazily brave' in the Evening Standard, longlisted for the Orwell Prize and translated into eight languages. His latest book, Unapologetic, was described by Nick Hornby as 'an incredibly smart, challenging, and beautiful book'. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge.