Tom's Midnight Garden

Author: (English) Philippa Pearce
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: One night, the antique clock downstairs suddenly struck thirteen times. Strange things happened—the backyard, usually filled with trash bins, transformed into a mysterious summer garden. In this mysterious garden, Tom had neither feet nor a shadow, and could pass through walls. However, he could see others, but they couldn’t see him. Only Heidi, a young girl without parents, could see him, though she thought he was a ghost.
Strange things always happened here—time moved forward and backward, seasons shifted between winter and summer, and Heidi grew and shrank unpredictably. What puzzled him was that no matter how long he wandered in the garden, when he returned to his bed, only a few minutes had passed since he left. Here, time seemed to rush especially quickly, Heidi’s growth was unusually fast, and Tom’s image grew increasingly blurry. Could he hold onto this beautiful and hallucinatory world? He had to find a way to experience time in both worlds simultaneously.
Tom’s Midnight Garden won the Carnegie Medal in 1958. The Carnegie Medal was established by the Library Association of the UK in 1935. It is awarded annually to English-language writers in the UK for the most outstanding children’s literature in English published in the UK the previous year. This book is widely recognized as a classic of modern children’s literature and has been adapted into a film.