Jane Gardam began her first novel, A Few Fair Days (1971), on the day her youngest son began school. She was thirty-nine years of age. Since then she has shown herself to be a writer of economy, humor, and empathy. Gardam writes both for adults and for children, moving effortlessly between these two readerships, and seems to find her own fascination with the theme of childhood a useful bridge between the two. Indeed, childhood not only has featured as one of her principal fictional themes, but she has also treated the subject in her illustrated nonfiction work, The Iron Coast: Notes from a Cold Country, published in 1994. She has won several prestigious literary awards, including the Whitbread Award (twice), the Katherine Mansfield Prize, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and was short-listed for the Booker Prize for God...