The Wind in the Willows

The pitch

A mole abandons spring cleaning, discovers the river, and falls in with a water-rat, a gruff badger, and a wealthy toad with a fatal weakness for motorcars. Half the book is the coziest idyll in English; the other half is Toad’s magnificently self-inflicted catastrophe, complete with prison break and the armed recapture of Toad Hall.

What to know

The riverbank chapters are slow on purpose, and they make a lovely bedtime read-aloud, with Paul Bransom’s 1913 plates in our edition. The prose runs lyrical. One chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” is practically a poem; some kids are transfixed and others fidget, and both are normal. When attention flags, Toad’s chapters are pure comedy and carry any listener through.

Life when written

Grahame spent his working life at the Bank of England and his happiness on the Thames, where Edwardian England had made a craze of rowing, picnic hampers, and messing about in boats. The motor-car was brand new in 1908 — loud, dusty, and alarming on country lanes that had always belonged to carts and horses. Toad’s poop-poop obsession was the newest mania of the age, satirized the very year it was happening.