Peter Pan

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. Fifty-five plates by painters including Edvard Munch and James Tissot, from 1868 to 1926, gather windows, bridges and evenings that echo the book's open nursery window and the children who fly from it.