A calm bedtime story for when you wake in the night and can't get back to sleep, set in a little clock shop above the harbour at siesta hour. A small brass clock has been left outside Tiempo Honesto before the shutters went up, with no name and no note, ticking steadily and perfectly backwards. Señor Tiempo checks it over and finds nothing wrong with it at all, only a maker who meant it. Prince Freddie sits beside the workbench through a long golden afternoon while the hands move the other way. A slow, warm story about something being very good and very strange, and not needing to explain itself.

Prince Freddie is a small dog in a flat gold crown who lives in a sleepy village on the Spanish coast, where the days are warm, the sea is always close, and nothing is ever in a hurry. These are unhurried sleep stories, written to quiet an anxious  ...