Thanks for Telling Me, Emily

This warm and light-hearted story draws the reader into a world that is anarchic and self-contained, and filled with eccentric characters. Keira is helping Aunt Emily run her pet shop during the summer holidays and becomes friends with an assortment of oddball pets who live together happily as an extended family. But everything changes when social climber Mrs Fysshe-Pye and her long-suffering son Ryan burst on the scene. Mrs Fysshe-Pye has just bought the castle overlooking the village and comes to the pet shop to pick out some showy animals to fill the gloomy and soulless rooms. Reluctantly Emily agrees to the sale of an enormously furry and brainy cat, an amiable parrot from the Amazonian rainforest and a faint-hearted scrap of a dog – thereby triggering a sequence of events that become ever more delightful, absurd and exciting. The story is endlessly quirky, and the ending just right and in keeping with the good-natured world that the author creates so effortlessly.

The story has a great deal of humour, drawn mainly from the foibles of the human and animal characters. This is a thoroughly enjoyable read, as remarkable for the freshness of its writing as for the upbeat tone and the idiosyncratic, distinctly drawn characters.