Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

Gradually at first, Hatty grows up and passes Tom's age he comes to realise that he is slipping to different points in the past. Tom writes daily accounts to his brother Peter, who follows the adventures during his recovery – and afterward, for Tom contrives to extend the stay with Aunt and Uncle. Hatty is established to be an orphan sent to live with her aunt and three older male cousins after the death of her parents. Tom sees the family occasionally, but only Hatty (and as is revealed later in the book, the gardener) sees him and the others believe she plays alone. There he meets another lonely child, a girl called Hatty, and they become inseparable playmates. However, when Tom checks the back door the following morning, the garden is no longer there.Įvery night the clock strikes 13 and Tom returns to the Victorian era grounds. He gets up to investigate and discovers that the back door now opens on a large sunlit garden. Without exercise he lies awake after midnight, restless, when he hears the communal grandfather clock strangely strike 13.

Because Tom may be infectious, he is not allowed out to play, and he feels lonely. The elderly and reclusive landlady, Mrs Bartholomew, lives above them. The former grounds of the big house have been sold for building and are occupied by modern houses. They live in an upstairs flat of a big house with no garden, only a tiny yard for parking. When Tom Long's brother Peter gets measles, Tom is sent to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen. At night he slips back in time to the old garden where he finds a girl playmate, called Hatty. Tom is a modern boy living under quarantine with his aunt and uncle in a city flat, part of a converted building that was a country house during the 1880s–1890s. In 2007, for a celebration of the Carnegie Medal's 70th anniversary, a panel named Tom's Midnight Garden one of the top ten Medal-winning works and the British public elected it the nation's second-favourite.

Pearce won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject.

It has been reissued in print many times and also adapted for radio, television, the cinema, and the stage. It was first published in 1958 by Oxford University Press with illustrations by Susan Einzig. Tom's Midnight Garden is a children's fantasy novel by Philippa Pearce.

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce