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‘I once decided to become friends with someone on the sole basis that she named O Caledonia as her favourite book’ Maggie O’Farrell

‘A wonderful oddity – brief, vivid, eccentric, written with ferocious zest and black humour’ Penelope Lively

Vera was painting the pony’s hooves gold in the dining room; Janet said this was bad for him; poison would seep into his bloodstream. At the bottom of a great stone staircase, dressed in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted in murderous death, lies Janet.

So end the sixteen years of Janet’s short life. A life spent in a draughty Scottish castle, where roses will not grow, and a jackdaw decides to live in the doll’s house. A life peopled by prettier, smoother-haired siblings, a Nanny with a face like the North Sea and the peculiar, whisky-swigging Cousin Lila.

A life where Janet is perpetually misunderstood – and must turn from people, to animals, to books, to her own wild and wonderful imagination.