But this is a skilful and deeply moving piece of work: poignant, beautifully judged, not a crass pastiche but a respectful homage that recycles its source material to pack a powerful anti-war punch.

This was the one I was least looking forward to reading because its historical and it's very much a traditional, old fashioned children's book (I'm too old for those now! So when the Lamb and Edie find the Psammead anew, the groundwork is there to narrativise the contrast/relationship between childhood and adulthood via these two sets within the sibling group.From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

Some of the Psammead’s past acts are quite horrific, and he seems pretty adamantly disinclined to indulge in any serious self-examination.The sand fairy of their childhood has become a creature of stories and memory - until he suddenly reappears. It was a surreal and uncanny experience but by the fourth page she had my heart and my trust that she was going to do something special with this story; embracing Nesbit’s style, sense of adventure and, most impressively, the characters’ voices and nature. I got the other one very obviously and it still drives me crazy insane in a good way which was probably why I picked this up instead of any other book I could've read because I knew it would do that.

Using letters from the trenches alongside the Psammead’s teleporting magic allows the reader to read two stories at once - that of the Psammead and his quest for redemption, and of Cyril, and indeed all of those young men at war. To take on Nesbit’s stories is brave and brilliantly done, and has the kind of ending that makes you feel sad and happy, warm and cold at the same time. Nowhere in the book do I really find these two ideas of the Edwardian child and the 1910s adult being brought to bear on each other. To everyone's surprise, once again, the Psammead is found sleeping in the gravel pit of the house in Kent. At the center of the novel, however, is the Great War and how it impacts everyone's life, even the Psammead.Well, as author Kate Saunders says of Nesbit’s classic, “Bookish nerd that I was, it didn’t take me long to work out that two of E. All because the author made him into some kind of tyrannical God who not only kept slaves, but killed many of them.

The story looks at the war but also Psammead's past crimes as a God and his need to find redemption before he can get his powers back. Even so, Saunders does a good job of fleshing them out enough that you begin to get a little sick in the stomach wondering who will live and who will die. Suddenly we’ve an author who dares to meld the light-hearted fantasy of Nesbit’s classic with the sheer gut-wrenching horror of The War to End All Wars. then I decided to reread a children's book I've read three times already instead of touching a single book on my literal thousand book goodreads TBR thumbsUP.But even worse is the fact that often you’ll find character development in classic titles isn’t what it is today.