The World Around the Corner

Description

Title: The World Around the Corner
Author: Maurice Gee
Illustrations: Gary Hebley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1980
Format: Hardback
Condition: Very Good — small inscription

Description:

Caroline finds a pair of old spectacles in her father’s junk shop. When she puts them on, she sees things very differently. The spectacles reveal a hidden world at the centre of New Zealand — near Nelson, through a gate on a hill — and that world is in danger. In a race against time, Caroline has to deal with the ghastly Grimbles and return the spectacles before it is too late.

The World Around the Corner is an illustrated children’s novel published in 1980 and still remembered with particular intensity by the generation who grew up in Nelson reading it. One Goodreads reviewer wrote: “Maurice Gee lived in the same small town as I did, and books like The World Around the Corner were set in places I saw every single day. At one point I even lived across the road from Botanical Hill, which is the focal setting. I can’t tell you how often I pretended to be Caroline, but it was lots.”

That is what the best NZ children’s fiction does: it places children inside their own landscape and tells them that their world is worth imagining in. This is Gee doing exactly that, two years after Plumb established him as NZ’s foremost adult novelist.

Why We Stock It:

Maurice Gee wrote this for the children who lived in the same landscape he did, and those children are adults now, and some of them will want to put it back on a shelf where a new child can find it.