By Ash, Oak and Thorn

About this book

Three tiny, ancient beings – Moss, Burnet and Cumulus, once revered as Guardians of the Wild World – wake from winter hibernation in their beloved ash tree home. When it is destroyed, they set off on an adventure to find more of their kind, a journey which takes them first into the deep countryside and then the heart of a city. Helped along the way by birds and animals, the trio search for a way to survive and thrive in a precious yet disappearing world ...

- The breathtaking children's debut from acclaimed nature writer and literary fiction novelist, Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley and At Hawthorn Time: shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and longlisted for the Baileys Prize.
- Inspired by 1942 classic The Little Grey Men by BB, with shades of The Borrowers.
- A tale of disappearing wilderness that couldn't be more relevant in today's environmental crisis, brought to life for children by three tiny, funny, eternal beings – the hidden folk

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Biography

Melissa Harrison is a novelist, children's author, journalist and nature writer. She contributes a monthly Nature Notebook column to The Times, and also writes regularly for the FT Weekend, the Guardian and the New Statesman. Her most recent novel, All Among the Barley, was the UK winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. It was a Waterstones Paperback of the Year and a Book of the Year in the Observer, the New Statesman and the Irish Times. At Hawthorn Time was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, while Rain: Four Walks in English Weather was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.

Melissa has appeared on BBC TV’s Newsnight, Springwatch and Springwatch Unsprung. She’s a regular guest on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, and has also appeared on the Today Programme, Start the Week, the Arts Show on Radio 2, the Arts Hour on the World Service, and on Monocle 24. She wrote and performed five episodes of the long-running Tweet of the Day slot on Radio 4, where her short story The Black Dog was also broadcast; she delivered a Proms interval talk on Radio 3, and wrote and performed an instalment of Radio 3’s The Essay, about Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, Wales.

She lives in Suffolk.