An enchanting final novel from a tragic giant of children’s literature
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Kate Saunders’s death last year, at the age of 62, robbed children’s fiction of one of its best-loved voices. After an initial career as an actress, she had gone on to write more than 20 novels, including The Belfry Witches (1999), which was made into a BBC television series, and Five Children on the Western Front (2014), which won the Costa Children’s Book Award. Many assumed, on her death, that her bibliography was sadly complete. So what a treat to discover this joy of a final novel, which Saunders had been editing in the months before she died.
A Drop of Golden Sun is set in 1973, when 10-year-old Jenny is talent-spotted in a school production of Alice in Wonderland, invited to an audition at Pinewood Studios, and stunned to find herself cast as one of the lead roles in a musical film. It has never occurred to Jenny that she could become an actress, and she has little idea what’s expected of her: “[She] did not understand the difference between what she was doing, which was apparently good, and showing off, which wasn’t.” And nothing can prepare her for the theatrical moods and egos she encounters when – accompanied by her shy, widowed mother – she’s flown off to join her “film family” on location in a chateau in France.
While the film in Saunders’s novel is fictional, it’s closely based on The Sound of Music, and involves a family of musicians fleeing from Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. Saunders skilfully weaves the film’s context into her own narrative by dint of characters such as Horst Lehzen, the German actor playing the Nazi commander: “You will all have to pretend to be very scared of me, but I am not evil in reality.”
She also has an eagle-eye for the absurd: there are some wonderful vignettes as one of the mothers on set takes to the bottle, and the children find themselves keeping the peace when a temperamental ageing actor threatens to sabotage the production.
Much of Saunders’s writing was inspired by tragic experience. She credited Five Children on the Western Front – a sequel to E Nesbit’s Five Children and It (1902) – to her son Felix, who had taken his own life in 2012 aged 19. In Saunders’s story, Nesbit’s children are several years older, and one of the brothers is killed in the First World War. And in an afterword to The Land of Neverendings (2017), about a girl grieving for her dead sister, she explained how Felix’s toys inspired the story.
This final novel, like those, is a multi-layered book, embracing serious themes. And, at the end, as a final blessing to her readers, Saunders takes her leave on a different note: one of unbridled optimism.
A Drop of Golden Sun is published by Faber at £7.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
