It is Midwinter's Eve at Brambly Hedge and everyone has a job. Primrose and Wilfred have a poem to recite after dark, so they climb to the attics to rehearse somewhere quiet. The attics are full of better things than rehearsing, and then they find a dusty staircase nobody has mentioned.

Jill Barklem drew these mouse houses in cross section, room by room, and that is why grown ups who owned Brambly Hedge as children buy it again for their own. Every page rewards a slow look: pantries stacked to the ceiling, tiny stairs behind the walls, flour bins, kettles, candle stubs. The story is gentle; the drawing is not simple at all.

Thirty two pages, hardcover, at picture book scale small enough for a child to hold open on their lap. It comes after the four seasonal stories: we carry Spring Story and Autumn Story on their own, all four seasons together in A Year in Brambly Hedge, and her Brambly Hedge drawings as line art in the Festive Coloring Book.