This is not a misery memoir, not sensationalist and not a celebrity memoir. In these luminous pages, Kevin Crossley-Holland, well-known poet and one of the country's most distinguished writers for children, visits the foreign land of childhood. From nights spent listening to stories told by his composer father and going to the 1948 Olympics through to idyllic cycle rides and discovering the first thrill of girls - these pages are full of anecdote, observation, and the old made new. This is also a book about budding self-awareness, the meeting-place of actuality and imagination and the ways in which a writer may draw on the quarry of childhood. Above all, The Hidden Roads revolves around the sanctity and splintering of family, and the bonding of brother and sister, and is steeped in the landscapes and layers of England.