The Changeling

Miss Durnthwaite lived by herself in Underscar Lodge, though Peggy Wray used to go in every day to help and to hear about Miss Durnthwaite's memories of life in the old days.

There was a mystery about Miss Durnthwaite. She could remember nothing of her life before she was twenty; no one knew what had made her lose her memory. But the eccentric old lady was always "looking for herself in this house where she had been born and brought up." She sometimes referred to herself as a changeling.

Peggy's brother Colin and his friend Jimmy were more interested in watching Jimmy's great-uncle Arthur Bower, an inventor. Arthur's most exciting invention, the Free Air Platform, was a kind of hovercraft. Arthur had made it forty years ago, but now it lay neglected on the dump behind his workshop.

There had never seemed to be any connection between Arthur and Miss Durnthwaite until Colin first saw the summerhouse, with its table laid for a long-forgotten tea party. But it was another tea party that finally solved the mystery of the summerhouse and Miss Durnthwaite's lost memory, and saw the Free Air Platform in use once more.

William Mayne's unusual books for young readers have won critical acclaim. A Grass Rope and The Blue Boat were chosen by the American Library Association as notable books. The Changeling will most certainly raink with the best of the author's work.