The Chronicles of Narnia – The Magician’s Nephew

C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew is an adventure for 8 year olds about two children who find a door out of our world entirely.

What happens

Digory has just been moved to London and he is miserable about it. His father is away in India. His mother is ill, seriously ill. He is living with an aunt and an uncle he has been told to stay away from.

Polly lives next door. She has a smugglers' cave in the attic tunnel behind the cistern, with a cash-box and usually a few apples in it. The two of them measure the rafters, do a sum, and set off to creep into the empty house at the end of the row.

They get the sum wrong.

The door they open is Uncle Andrew's study, and he locks it behind them. Then he offers Polly one of the bright yellow rings on his tray. She touches one. And there is no Polly.

What comes next is one of the best ideas in children's books. A warm green wood full of pools, so sleepy you forget your own name, where every pool drops you into a different world.

Reading it feels like being told a story out loud. Lewis keeps stopping to talk to you. He tells you how cheap the sweets were when your grandfather was a child. He tells you the children did their sum twice and he still is not sure they got it right.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Digory's mother is dying and he blurts it out on the second page, in tears, to a girl he has only just met. It is not a twist and it is not hidden away. Uncle Andrew is properly horrible too, not comic horrible. He shuts Digory up by reminding him what a fright would do to his mother.

If that sits too close to home right now, it will sit too close. For most readers it is what gives the whole thing its weight. Digory wants something very badly, which is why he keeps going.

And there is a dead city waiting, dusty and silent, with a hall of robed figures sitting perfectly still in their crowns.

What to read next

This is the one that explains where the wardrobe came from, so it reads beautifully either side of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where four children sent out of London during the war find a country stuck in winter.