An Episode of Sparrows

Rumer Godden

may 2016 · New York Review of Books

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This much-loved English novel from Rumer Godden is reminiscent of The Secret Garden, telling a fairy tale-esque story about neighborhood children and a mysterious garden in post-WWII London.

An emergency meeting of the Mortimer Square Garden Committee has been convened to discuss a most alarming matter: someone has been digging in the garden and making off with buckets of dirt. Miss Angela Chesney is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street is to blame. But Angela’s sister, Olivia, isn’t so sure.

Olivia has always wondered why the neighborhood children—the “sparrows” she sometimes watches from the window of her house—are kept out of the private 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, rich 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.
 
“[An] extraordinarily gifted writer who manages to infuse her novels with a special magic of their own.”—Boston Herald

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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 turned to writing to pay off her many debts. She wrote over sixty books for adults and young adults, including The Doll’s House, Impunity Jane, and The Greengage Summer.