Rumer Godden (1907–1998) grew up in India, where her father ran a steamship company. When her husband left her penniless in Calcutta with two daughters to raise, she started to write books to pay off her many debts. She wrote more than sixty books for adults and young adults, including The Doll's House, Impunity Jane, The Greengage Summer, An Episode of Sparrows and The Mousewife. »

An Episode Of Sparrows

By Rumer Godden

A much-loved English novel reminiscent of The Secret Garden

Someone has dug up the private garden in the square and taken buckets of dirt, and Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street must be to blame. But Angela's sister Olivia isn't so sure. Olivia wonders why the neighborhood children—the “sparrows” she sometimes watches from the window of her house —have to be locked out of the garden. Don't they have a right to enjoy the place, too? But neither Angela nor Olivia has any idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of “good, garden earth.” Still less do they imagine where their investigation of the incident will lead them—to a struggling restaurant, a bombed-out church, and at the heart of it all, a hidden garden.

Reviews

With her unsentimental view of childhood and sharp eye for the telling detail, Godden brings this long-vanished corner of London to brilliant life.
— Terri Schmitz, Horn Book

Only Rumer Godden could make a simple tale of a forbidden garden pulse with suspense, could avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality, could breathe into such ordinary adults and ordinary children the quickness, the hope and the hopelessness of life itself.
— New York Herald Tribune Book Review

Also see:

Carbonel By Barbara Sleigh Illustrations by V. H. Drummond Appearances can be deceiving. Some old ladies are witches, some brooms can fly, and some ordinary-looking cats are Princes of the Royal Blood.

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