Leila Berg Flickerbook Inside Flaps

Unusual for an autobiography, Flickerbook is a re-living rather than a remembering. The distinguished children's author and writer on children and education, Leila Berg, re-experiences her early Jewish childhood and adolescence during the twenties and thirties up until the day when the first air-raid siren sounded. Nourished in her battle to make sense of the world by the riches of Manchester - the theatre, the bookstalls, the music, the cinema, a joyful love of the surrounding countryside - she grows into a fiercely independent young woman, and joins the anti-fascists, then the Young Communists. Refusing to go to university, appalled by her brief experience of teacher training college, she falls in love; but both her lovers are killed, fighting in Spain in the International Brigde. Leila Berg introduces us to a sad, funny and passionate child who we see grow through the years. Flickerbook extraordinarily honest and moving autobiography which will change the way we think about children and childhood forever.

Leila Berg lived as a child in Salford, Lancashire, spent fifty years in London on both sides of the river, and now lives in Wivenhoe, North Essex, in a seventeenth-century cottage. All her books are either about children, or for children. Risinghill, Death of a Comprehensive School (1968), the story of Michael Duane's school in Islington, London, was the first nonfiction paperback to start at the top of the bestseller list and stay there for months. It was for all of her children's books (Little Pete, My Dog Sunday and many others), but above all for the Nippers series, after which first reading-books in primary schools were never the same, that she received the Eleanor Farjeon Medal in 1973. She was a defence witness in the Oz Trial. She has one daughter, one son and four grandchildren.

Flickerbook: - Introduction - Extracts - Reviews