When Tom is sent to stay at his aunt and uncle's house for the summer, he resigns himself to endless weeks of boredom. As he lies awake in his bed he hears the grandfather clock downstairs strike . . .eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . .
Thirteen! Tom races down the stairs and out the back door, into a garden everyone told him wasn't there. In this enchanted thirteenth hour, the garden comes alive - but Tom is never sure whether the children he meets there are real or ghosts . . . This entrancing and magical story is one of the best-loved children's books ever written.
Philippa Pearce was born in 1920 and spent her childhood in Great Shelford, south of Cambridge, where her father was a flour-miller. The village and the river that ran by the mill played a large part in shaping her stories, especially Minnow on the Say and Tom's Midnight Garden. For most of her adult life she lived within a few yards of her childhood home.
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