During a long writing career, Nina Bawden has produced a large and significant body of novels for adults, children, and juveniles. Unlike some writers who “move up” from young people's fiction to more mainstream books for adults, she has continued to work in both fields. The awards she has received, including the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award and a Booker Prize nomination, as well as many prizes for her children's books, testify to her achievement. She began her career as a writer of two elegantly plotted murder stories and then worked her way through several other novel genres, including the Gothic romance, the Bildungsroman, and the horror story. In 1960 her first effort at social satire, Just Like a Lady, was published, and, since her early formal explorations, she has mostly used her adult novels for the psychological dissection of modern British middle-class existence. Bawden is perhaps...