Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Author’s Foreword

This book is one of my own special favourites. I saved it up for years, thinking about it, working it out, saying to myself: ‘One day, when I’ve plenty of time, and want to really enjoy myself—I’ll begin it!’ I should say that of one’s output, five books are work to one that is real pleasure. was pure pleasure. I often wonder whether people who read a book can know if it has been hard work or a pleasure to write? Again and again someone says to me: ‘How you must have enjoyed writing so and so!’ This about a book that obstinately refused to come out the way you wished, whose characters are sticky, the plot needlessly involved, and the dialogue stilted—or so you think yourself. But perhaps the author isn’t the best judge of his or her own work. However, practically everybody has liked so I am justified in my own belief that it is one of my best.

I don’t know what put the Leonides family into my head—they just came. Then, like Topsy ‘they growed’.

I feel that I myself was only their scribe.