Tortoise by Candlelight — Nina Bawden

'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.