Anna James reads from Alice With a Why | Blackwell's Children's Book of the Year

Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago

Buy your SIGNED copy: blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Alice-with-a-Why-by-Anna-James-author-Matthew-Land-illustrator-Lewis-Carroll-associated-with-work/2100000297863

Meet Anna James at our Alice With a Why event in our Oxford shop: eventbrite.co.uk/e/anna-james-alice-with-a-why-tickets-1975814044996

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The winner of the Children’s Book of the Year is Alice with a Why by Anna James, illustrated by Matthew Land. This charming and whimsical book really caught the imagination of both us and our customers when it was published earlier this year.

It’s a suitably playful and enchanting reimagining of Alice in Wonderland. This version is set in England in 1919 and features Alyce – with a Y – who lives with her grandmother, the original Alice, having lost her father during the great war. In many ways, this spectacular book gifts us the best of both worlds: we meet many familiar characters but are treated to a thoroughly original story.

In the words of Pari Thomson (author of Greenwild), this is “a beautiful and witty return to Wonderland, infused with all the nonsense, mischief and delight of the original.”

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$Pan by Michael W. Clune | Blackwells.co.uk Buy your copy:https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Pan-by-Michael-W-Clune/9781529969894 Fiction Book of the Month - August 2026 A strange and brilliant teenagers first panic attacks send him down a rabbit hole in this wild, critically acclaimed debut. Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable. Hes fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his mostly absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor calls it panic, but Nicholas suspects something stranger: that the Greek god Pan is trapped inside him. As his sense of reality fractures, Nicholas and his friends search for answers in art, music and literature, reaching beyond the limits of their lives. Thrilling, surprising and darkly funny, Pan explores the unsettling forces shaping our inner worlds. A stunning debut . . . Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I’ve read how these can be experienced as black magic . . . When we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world - Guardian Pan holds your attention as a sweet-and-sour tale of the no man’s land between childhood and adulthood . . . In this stylish and unsettling novel, the greatest fear is that inside your head is the only place to be - Observer A true original . . . A new Michael Clune book is a cause for celebration - Paul Murray Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling - Lauren Groff Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him - Maggie Nelson [Clune] is writing in the tradition of Proust, Sebald, Jenny Offill, Teju Cole and Nicholson Baker, writers whose eccentricities manifest in singular voices that are propulsive enough without pyrotechnic narratives. Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs . . . I could have read 300 pages of just this — Nicholas looking out the window and describing what he saw — and felt that I’d gotten my money’s worth - New York Times I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune - Ben Lerner #books #blackwells #author$

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