A boy who will not grow up comes in at a Bloomsbury nursery window after his shadow, and carries three children off to an island of pirates, mermaids and a crocodile with a clock inside it. Barrie wrote the play first and this novel seven years later, and gave the whole copyright to a children's hospital in London, which holds it still. Beneath the flying it is a book about a window left open, and about what it costs Peter to be the one who never comes back. Ninety-five plates, among them Munch and Lavery, gather childhood, meadows and evening light into a single gallery of the world Peter flies above.
