Sentimental Tommy: The Story of His Boyhood

Before Peter Pan ever flew to Neverland, there was Tommy Sandys: a boy with an imagination so vivid it could make a grey London tenement shimmer with magic. Five years old and roaming the dirty stairs of his building, Tommy has already invented Thrums, a mythical homeland he holds closer than reality. When his mother teaches him to refuse charity with quiet pride, and when he encounters a little girl who believes his stories, Tommy begins to learn that imagination is both a gift and a weight he must carry. Barrie paints the interior world of childhood with aching precision: the way a child's logic operates like its own religion, the way poverty coexists with wonder, the way love and loss become indistinguishable in a young heart. This is the book that contains the seeds of everything Barrie would later create, but it stands on its own as a tender, bittersweet portrait of the precise moment when a child begins to suspect that growing up is inevitable. For readers who have ever held a private world inside their chest and wondered what became of it.