JOHNNY SWANSON BY ELEANOR UPDALE RARE SIGNED + DOODLED FIRST EDITION BOOK

There is a kind of children’s book that is rare but that includes some of the very best literature for the young. The Silver Sword, Goodnight Mister Tom, The Butterfly Lion, The Railway Children and Kim all belong to a genre in which there is no magic but a tremendous sense of what real children in adversity might achieve with courage, cleverness and luck.

Eleanor Updale’s Johnny Swanson belongs to this category, and it deserves the highest praise. The author, best known for her charming Victorian adventures involving the burglar-turned-gentleman spy Montmorency, has taken an entirely new direction in a tale of a small, lonely boy who gets drawn into a serious crime involving the development of the TB vaccine.

Johnny lost his father in the First World War and his mother barely scrapes a living as a cleaner for the local doctor in a small village. Picked on as a “squirt”, he briefly befriends another ostracised child, Olwen, whose family are ill with tuberculosis. It’s 1929, and there is no cure: but Mrs Swanson’s employer, Dr Langford, knows that in France they are developing what will become the BCG vaccine. How it gets to the wider public will, however, involve deception, incarceration, mystery and a murder.

Early this year an exclusive scoop of Eleanor Updale’s new title Johnny Swanson was secured for Doodled Books collectors. This hot children’s book has class written all over it. Each rare first edition book is signed, lined, doodled and dated. And these rare books were signed at the authors home in the UK and we are proud to have them in our portfolio.

In our opinion Johnny Swanson would make a fantastic film and it deserves to win prizes. And you just have to love the cover of the book – it is stunning!

Special offer – this is the secret of instant delight. Be the first to read “Johnny Swanson”! The book that’s got the nation talking – yours by return of post. All is revealed: the truth about the Stambleton murder; the facts behind the TB scare; the real identity of Ada Ardour; and, one boy’s fight to save his mother’s life! All this, and the answer to the burning question of 1929: What on earth is a Clong?

Eleanor Updale has been writing books since the turn of the century. Before that, she worked in radio and television: mainly on news programmes including The World at One and Newsnight. She is a governor of the children’s charity, Coram, and a member of the Clinical Ethics Committee at Great Ormond Street Hospital. She also has a PhD in History. All those interests have influenced this book. Eleanor’s Montmorency series has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic.