Amazon.com description: Product Description: Nina Bawden, one of the most accomplished contemporary novelists, is admired as a writer who unravels the complex emotions that simmer beneath respectable family life. Her first book appeared in 1953. Since then, she has published nineteen adult novels, including Circles of Deceit, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Family Money. She is also the author of seventeen children's books: her best-selling Carrie's War (1973) and The Peppermint Pig (1975) have become contemporary classics; most recently she has published Humbug (1992) and The Real Plato Jones (1993). Now Nina Bawden turns her acute eye to her own story. She weaves a rich tapestry of the past, its characters, and "myths, half-truths, fancies, and deceits" that make up family history. Along the way she reveals the inspiration behind many of her books, such as her childhood evacuation during the war to Suffolk and Wales, where, billeted with seven different families, she discovered each one's dusty skeletons. During her Oxfor