Mary Lennox is a thoroughly unlikeable child when we meet her, and that is the whole point. Orphaned by cholera and shipped from India to a Yorkshire house where nobody wants her either, she is sour, spoiled and alone, and then she finds a walled garden that has been locked for ten years. What grows back over the following spring is the garden, a sickly boy nobody talks about, and Mary herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett published it in 1911 and it has never been out of print since, because it is one of the few children's books that treats a difficult child seriously instead of scolding her.

This Canterbury Classics edition is made to be given: a heat burnished cover, foil stamping and specially designed endpapers, in a flexible binding that opens flat. It is the right present for a ten year old and, quietly, for the adult who remembers exactly when they first read it.