The Other Side of Summer (by Peggy Dunstan)

• 1983 first edition,  208 pages
• Published by Hodder & Stoughton
• Hardcover with dust jacket, green boards
• Very good condition, minor cover wear

Illustrated by Jonathon Dunstan.    'If summer were all sun and shine it would be lovely, but only a dream.  The real thing is so much more entertaining.  Well, it was for us with its ups and downs, its serene gold and blue days contrasting with the mad excitement of things not so serene.   The stormy side was so consistently interesting.  Our searching for the Clargincharger, that fabled beast with teeth like Pan William's mother.  Routing the Yellow Peril in Haining Street, and firefighting on the Cashmere hills beside a peg-legged man liable to lash out sideways with the leg in moments of extremity.  Saving Mrs Lonnigan from her husband's hatchet, and agonizing over the fate of a dismal Mickey Mouse lost in the vastness of Cathedral Square."

Few writers have the gift of being able to evoke the reality of childhood.  Peggy Dunstan is one of these, and her books will take their place among the handful of classics in the genre.

In The Other Side of Summer, that childhood is in Christchurch and Wellington in the 1920s and 1930s, but such is the magic of these stories that Peggy Dunstan's world becomes timeless, and readers of all ages, children past and present, will recognise it and delight in it.