Vinegar Street
By Philip Ridley
Published by Puffin
Price £3.99
Age 10+

For Poppy Picklesticks, Vinegar Street is a realm of delight, where the moonlight glimmers on the green slime in the canal and beetles scurry over broken glass. The other inhabitants are eccentric: Auntie Bruiser with her motorbike, Uncle Larry with his cocktail habit... but one day a new tenant arrives: the stunning, sexy Mandy Nylon. And everything starts to go wrong.

How it all comes right again forms the story. This is a genuine poetic fantasy of a kind that doesn't come along very often, and ought to be cherished when it does.