Book description
Winner of the Guardian Children's Award and first in the highly
acclaimed EXILES series. The Conroys are no ordinary family. For a
start, they don't have a television. Nor are they allowed to keep pets.
And Mr and Mrs Conroy never take their daughters - Ruth, Naomi, Rachel
and Phoebe - on holiday. But then Mr and Mrs Conroy inherit £5000, and,
to their daughters' dismay, decide to spend it redecorating the house
over the summer. So the girls are packed off to Big Grandma's house for
the holidays, where lots of chores and horribly long walks await them.
At first it seems as though Big Grandma is determined to put a stop to
any fun. But, being Conroys, the girls soon find novel ways to entertain
themselves, and start having as many adventures and mishaps as usual . .
. and after a while, even Big Grandma doesn't seem so bad . . . Hilary
McKay won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize with her first novel,
The Exiles
. Her subsequent work has achieved recognition: The Exiles at Home
won the Smarties Prize, whilst Saffy's Angel
, the first in the Casson Family series, won the Whitbread Award, for
which the third book, Permanent Rose
, was also shortlisted.
