The care of the Psammead is left to the youngest, the Lamb and the new arrival to the family - Edie. Older siblings might engage in romance or do tough war jobs but their voices and emotional lives remain as simple, accessible and childlike as the youngsters.

With the children’s help, he learns to repent but Saunders doesn’t labour this point and her use of well-timed humour makes the message even more poignant: ‘Committing more murders,’ the Lamb suggested. All of the children have nicknames-Cyril-Squirrel, Robert-Bobs, Hilary-Lamb, Edith-Edie, Anthea-Panther and Jane-Puss. Something has happened to the psammead and it is for the Edie and the others to unravel the reasoning as to why he does not have the power he once wielded. I think that one of the things I enjoyed most about the original Five Children and It (although it's probably been about 15-20 years since I read it) was that the wishes always went awry, and the Psammead was just like "lol w/e" while the children scrabbled to get themselves out of all sorts of scrapes. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.And poor Jane desperately wants to go to medical school, which her mother refuses to allow, afraid she won't ever get married if she does go. Saunders hadn't done enough to communicate any emotional connection between the Psammead and the character in question, or the children as a group.

In this book we are also introduced to the Lamb, now a schoolboy, and his younger sister Edie, who was not born when the children first met It, otherwise known as the Psammead.Anthea then makes an off-handed comment that when she looked at the photos on the wall she saw plenty of ladies who looked like young versions of their mother but she couldn’t find the boys.

It's sad to see this character profoundly injured and that character die, but the book is so quick to an assurance that everything is all right really. Their fifth and sixth siblings are a good deal younger, still children as we find them: Hilary/the Lamb (only a baby in Nesbit's books) is 12 as the book proper starts.It is completely unsurprising to learn, in the afterword, that Saunders' own son died in 2012, and although she doesn't make the connection explicit, it's impossible not to read that as a catalyst for her fictional examination of lost childhood. Confronting issues of class, disillusion, meaningless war, and empathy, the book transcends its source material and is all the better for it.