Five Children and It

On their first day in a country house for the summer, four children — Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane — go digging in a sandy gravel-pit and unearth something no one has seen for thousands of years. It is the Psammead: a Sand-fairy, ancient and furry and bat-eared and supremely bad-tempered, who has slept beneath the sand since children wished for pterodactyls to eat. Grumbling at every turn, it agrees to grant them one wish a day — with one catch that runs through the whole book: each wish wears off at sunset.

From that single rule comes a chain of glorious disasters. The children wish to be as beautiful as the day, and are locked out of their own house, unrecognised and starving. They wish for riches, and are handed gold no shop will take. They wish for wings, soar over the countryside, and come down stranded on a church tower as the light begins to fail. Every wish is granted exactly, literally, and ruinously — because the children wish the way children think, for the dazzling surface of a thing and never its consequences — and every sunset leaves them to scramble out of the scrape it has dug.

Funny, fast, and quietly wise, Five Children and It is the great comic lesson in being careful what you wish for. But it is also something larger: by planting a genuine magical creature in a world of trains and tempers and bread-and-butter and bedtime, E. Nesbit founded the modern tradition of everyday fantasy and gave English children's literature one of its most beloved and exasperating creatures.

First of the Psammead trilogy — followed by The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet — it has never been out of print, and its influence runs straight through a century of children's books, from C. S. Lewis to Edward Eager and far beyond.