From the outside, 5 Brocklehurst Grove looks like an ordinary house - the windows are always clean, and the garden well tended. And from the inside, to hear the voices of the inhabitants, the Mennym family, you would think they were a perfectly ordinary family, too.

But you'd be wrong, for the Mennyms are far from ordinary.

The whole family shares an astonishing secret behind which it's hidden for forty years; a secret to which nobody has ever come close - until perhaps, now.

When a letter arrives from Australia, the whole family is plunged into fear that now, for the first time, their secret is about to be exposed . . . Sylvia Waugh's extraordinary debut novel about the Mennyms, a family of life-sized rag dolls, won the 1994 Guardian Children's Fiction Award.