Alan Garner has become, through a relatively modest output, one of the most important writers for children since 1960. His work is carefully crafted, economic, and precise. His early works-- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley (1960), The M...

When Alan Garner was a child, he almost died three times. A very sickly boy, he suffered variously from spinal and cerebral meningitis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and diphtheria, at times so ill that he could neither speak nor move. It was on these occasions t...

In 1968 Alan Garner, defending his focus on the adolescent audience, asserted in "A Bit More Practice" that "This group of people is the most important of all, and selfishly, it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement." Yet...

Alan Garner, read by Garard Green. Listening Library (800-243-4504), three cassettes, 4 hrs, 13 min., $23.98 ISBN 0-8072-7790-8 Green invigorates this memorable fantasy with both thrills and heartfelt emotion, providing a thoroughly satisfying ride for listeners. When the four bored Watson children...

Harcourt Books 525 "B" St., #1900, San Diego, CA 92101 www.HarcourtBooks.com Any who have not enjoyed Alan Garner's long-time classic Elidor (0132056246, $6.95) are in for a treat: four ordinary siblings looking for fun find themselves transported back in time...

Elidor is the third long novel by a writer much involved with the meeting of ancient world and new: this, if the least wildly poetic, is also the most skilful of the three. It is ambitiously imagined and worked out with a hard economical tension: the reader is kept—except for some dazzling visionary moments—well on the present-day human side of the arena. It is, you might say, a reanimation of the Roland/Burd-Ellen legend in a modern industrial setting. There are cracks where the fabric of tim...