The Sam Pig Storybook

It is very good to see the reappearance of Sam Pig in the Faber's 'Children's Classic' series. Sam, by turn imaginative, brave, dreamy and determined, is one of Uttley's most successful creations for younger readers. Together with his two occasionally stroppy brothers, Tom and Bill, his patient, homely sister Ann, and the reassuringly sensible and strong father-figure of Brock the badger, Sam inhabits a world in which the sometimes harsh realities of everyday rural life jostle with magic and whimsy. It is a landscape in which dragons wake from their timeless slumbers, foxes try to pull off smart tricks, scarecrows come to life, rivers rise in anger and cart horses slog through their routine labours. Uttley took great delight in the best-selling success of the Sam Pig stories, remembering how as a child at Castle Top farm in Derbyshire she used regularly to talk to the pigs in 'their palatial sty', and 'was at one with them'. This attractive book, in effect the 'Best of Sam Pig', will remind today's readers of the charm and power of her writing.