Wendell and the Winter Fair

A boy. A dog nobody else can see. And a wheel of lights standing in a frozen field.

There is a house at the end of Plum Street with nobody in it. Then, one morning in January, there is a van.

Milo Finch is seven. He has Wendell - enormous, the colour of buttered toast, one ear up and one ear that has never worked a day in its life - and Wendell has been the one who stays awake since the leaves came down two autumns ago. But the boy who moves in at the end of the road doesn't talk. And when he finally does, what he says is this: I used to have one. I haven't got him now.

What Milo decides to do about that is the hardest thing he has ever done, and it takes six days, and the end of his bed is flat for every one of them.

Then the posters go up. The fair is coming back to the same field where Milo lost Wendell in the noise when he was six - and this time there is a plan written on the back of an envelope, a gate to stand at, and a word to say if the old feeling comes back.

Forty short stories, one for every night, each about five minutes to read aloud. A snow dog with the right ears. A tiger called Mr Andrews. A telephone at eleven o'clock. A crocus coming up through a frozen lawn like it's easy.

Wendell and the Winter Fair is Book Two of the Plum Street Stories. It stands on its own, but it was built for readers who have already met a very large dog in a pile of leaves.

Ages 3-8 to be read aloud. Ages 6-9 to read alone. Illustrated throughout.