Tommy Tregennis

Five-year-old Tommy Tregennis has torn his trousers playing near the sea, and he knows his mother will be waiting at the door. This is the entire drama of the novel: a small boy's terror at disappointing the people who love him, set against the sunlit hazards of a Cornish fishing village in 1912. Mary Elizabeth Phillips captures childhood with an accuracy that still aches - the enormous weight of a secret, the elaborate calculations of a child's guilt, the way a mother's face can feel like the whole world. Tommy navigates his days through mischief and tenderness, through the small adventures that feel immense to a five-year-old: the village shop, the rocky shore, the long walk to school. This is a book that remembers what it felt like to be young and certain that every transgression was existential. It endures because every adult was once a child who felt exactly this way, and some part of them still remembers.