Publisher's Synopsis
"Recommended for those who love words and who do not mind a leisurely pace. A masterpiece!" AMAZON.COM customer An immortal portrayal of the delights and agonies of childhood and innocence. JOHN BETJEMAN L.P. Hartley's timeless novel opens with nine-year-old Eustace watching an anemone devour a shrimp in a rock-pool on a Norfolk beach during the summer holidays. Eustace is a natural hedonist, gentle, aesthetic, sociable, who lives to please and to be pleased. His puritanical sister, Hilda, is three or four years older and her aim in life is to mould Eustace in the image of her ideal. But the outside world of other children and adults, illness, funerals and schooling soon impinges on their innocent intimacies and fantasies. And these shadows bring anxieties about themselves and the constraints of their cosseted Edwardian lives to the forefront.
