Shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1987. New Zealander Noel Virtue creates here a wonderful account of childhood. Elsdon Bird is an affectionate and imaginative child who is raised in a family steeped in the religious intolerance of the Christian Brethren sect. After the family is forced to move because of father's proselytizing, young Elsdon tries to escape his family's religious fundamentalism by creating his own fragile world of imagination. When a sequence of disasters finally breaks up the family. Elsdon's amazing resilience and precocious humanity must see him through. A Peter Owen Modern Classic.