Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Kids
ISBN: 9781681376547
Pages: 256
Publication Date: May 17, 2022
The Little Grey Men Go Down the Bright Stream
by BB
Sneezewort, Baldmoney, Dodder, and Cloudberry are the last gnomes in Britain. Life along the Folly Brook, where the gnomes live companionably with the birds and beasts, is wild and wet, just the way they like it. But one spring day, waking up from a long winter sleep, the gnomes are confronted by an inescapable fact: Their brook is drying up and will soon be uninhabitable.
A sequel to BB’s award-winning The Little Grey Men, this novel is about the gnomes’ perilous and daring search for a new home. Warwickshire and the rest of their beloved country has been despoiled by men, and the gnomes must find another place as wild and wet as their home once was.
Part fantasy, part ecological parable, The Little Grey Men Go Down the Bright Stream was first published in 1948 and remains as exciting, poignant, and far-seeing as ever.
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Praise
A couple of years ago I found myself gazing at the cover of a book I’d loved as a child... I braced myself in case its magic had faded in the 40 years since it had been read to me at bedtime... I loved B.B.’s illustrations, the precise and detailed rendering of the natural history in the book, and most of all the feeling it gave me of a secret world to which I was being granted privileged access. I needn’t have worried. As I turned the pages I found myself enchanted all over again.
—Melinda Harrison on The Little Grey Men, The Guardian