Mrs Apple News Today

It all started with Brambly Hedge and those exquisite drawings of Mrs Apple’s kitchen at Crabapple Cottage: her shelves overflowing with homemade jams, woven baskets heaped with currants and rosehips, drying herbs strung up in bunches along wooden beams. I could only have been four or five when I read Jill Barklem’s books, but I already knew I wanted to sit at Mrs Apple’s table and taste her freshly baked bread and blackberry puddings. I longed to be young Wilfred, off on an adventure, gat...

Growing up in suburban London with Jamaican heritage, novelist Fiona Williams was enchanted by the bucolic visions of our classic children’s literature. But moving to the country as an adult raised complex feelings about belonging