The Children's Book

Olive Wellwood writes successful children's books at the turn of the 20th century, lives in a rambling country house called Todefright, and keeps a private story for each of her own children in a series of bound notebooks. The book opens at a summer party at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1895 and moves across the next 20 years through the Wellwoods and their bohemian circle of potters, puppeteers, Fabians, and German anarchists. As the children grow into adults, the hidden lives the parents have concealed surface one by one, until the First World War sweeps the survivors into the trenches and the long Edwardian summer ends.