Tortoise by Candlelight (Virago Modern Classics) - Softcover

Bawden, Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844084361 ISBN 13: 9781844084364

Publisher: Virago, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

An exceptional picture of disorganised family life ... Imaginative, tender, with a welcome undercurrent of toughness' Observer

About the Author:

Nina Bawden (1925-2012) was one of Britain's best-loved writers for both adults and children. Several of her children's books - Carrie's War, a Phoenix Award winner;The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; and Keeping Henry - have become contemporary classics. She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, and she was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime's contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1844084361
• ISBN 13: 9781844084364
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240