Written by E. Nesbitt. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. First Henry Holt Little Classics Edition, 1994. (Originally published in the UK in 1906.) Henry Holt & Company.
The Railway Children tells the story of three siblings, Roberta, Peter and Phyllis, who move with their mother from London to a cottage near a railway station in the countryside after their father is mysteriously taken away. There they make friends with the railway workers, the local villagers and a kind old gentleman who regularly takes the train. They also have many adventures involving trains, such as rescuing a baby from a tunnel, preventing a landslide, saving a Russian exile and finding their father.
Edith Nesbit (1858 - 1924) was a British writer and poet who published her books for children under the name E. Nesbit. She married Hubert Bland, a political writer and a socialist, in 1880 and had three children with him. She also adopted two more children from his affairs with another woman. She was a co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that later became part of the Labour Party. She wrote more than 60 books for children, including The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Five Children and It, and The Story of the Amulet. She also wrote novels and poems for adults.
Shirley Hughes (1927 - 2022) was a renowned English author and illustrator of more than 200 children's books, selling over 10 million copies worldwide. She began her career as an illustrator for other authors, such as Dorothy Edwards, before creating her own stories, such as Lucy And Tom's Day (1960). She achieved fame and recognition with her series Alfie, about a young boy and his sister Annie Rose, and Dogger, about a boy who loses his beloved toy dog. She won the Kate Greenaway Medal twice, for Dogger (1977) and Ella's Big Chance (2003), and received the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement award in 2015.
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Condition: Fine/Near Fine. Dust jacket: Light shelf wear. Gold-embossed purple cloth cover boards. Pages are clean, undamaged, and complete.
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