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The writing is not pretentious, the people feel real, everything that happens is described so clearly that I still feel I am in Judith Dunbar's Dower House listening to the rain on the roof. Let me just say here, it has been quite a while since I've read a book filled with such wistful longing.

I'll stop now, but I really like the evocative writing in this book, at which Pilcher certainly excels. He has an unerring moral compass – his schoolteacher past has never quite left him – and books such as War Horse and The Butterfly Lion have a strong social concience and an honesty that makes them universal.

For this service, fraught with discomfort, and even danger if there happened to be a roaring ebb-tide, he charged twopence.

Michael's books have been translated into many languages including Chinese, Bulgarian and Hungarian, Hebrew and Japanese. I couldn't decide what books to read when I have my surgery ~~ and I was browsing through my shelves when I saw this. Prepping the space, painting, more painting, still painting, assembling new bookcases, and putting the room back together again. I could close my eyes and see the Laura Knight image Pilcher described and I knew who Loveday was and who she was to Gus.

We meet Judith Dunbar, a 14 year old girl in 1935, as her mother and baby sister are preparing to leave her in an English boarding school and join her father in Singapore. To touch the lives of children, to witness their listening and reading silence, is reward enough in itself.