The Railway Children
Three children move to a cottage in the country after their father disappears, and the railway becomes the centre of their lives. Nesbit wrote the novel in 1906, and it is unusual for its period in treating the children's poverty and their mother's work with seriousness.
The plot is episodic: a broken leg, a rescued train, a Russian exile. The famous ending, in which the father returns, is sentimental, but the middle chapters are clear-eyed about how a family survives a sudden loss of income. It is a good book to read aloud.
Public-domain status
First published in 1906. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; E. Nesbit died in 1924, so this work has been free to republish there since 1995.
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