[The books in Alan Garner's quartet] are the longest short books I've ever read; and I mean that in their quite exhilarating concision they cover, and carry the delight of eighty years (from c1860 to c1940) in the life of a family in Alan Garner's own corner of the world, Alderly Edge in Cheshire. A succession of grandads, fathers, youths, Josephs and Roberts and Williams, they work in stone and wood and metal. Work, and the mysteries of work, are of supreme importance.

In the first book, The Stone Book, Mary's father is capping the steeple of the new St Philip's Church…. There's an account of working in stone, of the able magic of it, that's echoed in the last book, Tom Fobble's Day, with an account of working in wood and metal: a grandfather, to whom Mary's father is a grandfather, makes a sledge for William. And William uses this sledge to exceed all previous local records in sledging: and the description of his stunning runs from the top of Lizzie Leah's is an example of the element each book contains, alongside the element which consists of the fine description of working skills: I think of this other ingredient as an exhilaration. Something is always breathlessly and marvellously done. Mary climbs to the very weathercock of the new church and there whirls round, while her world turns with her. Your breath goes as you read…. There are exhilarations in all the books….

And everything, in this huge miniature story of a family and a whole corner of England, has something to say about more than itself. Mary's swing round the weathercock tells her, and us, everything about Chorley, social and industrial and political…. The sense of an intolerable difference of social fate quivers in all the books, here and there half-declared…. In The Aimer Gate (and that's the gate of death on the battlefield) the marvellous moments of the harvest, the cry of the other sort of field, the summer field …, are set against its being doomed Uncle Charlie's last home leave. (The last book confirms the doom; but we know of it all through The Aimer Gate, and mostly by a prickling of the skin as vague and certain as life might provide, though most surely when Uncle Charlie shoots the rabbits bolting from the last stretch of corn and in their death they're like poppies.) Uncle Charlie is as exact with his rifle as they've all been with stone or wood or metal…. Much in these books is most fiercely said by barely being said at all.

They are, indeed, beautiful books. Because of their rare clarity, and those exhilarations, they will be much loved by many children. But they're books for everybody. They are among those uncommon books that cause perfectly natural laughter and tears in a reader. They are ripe with feeling. They have moments of rich comedy. They are full of music and wit. The generations they speak for could not have asked for a finer memorial. And the way the books are made adds, to that proud skill in stone, wood and metal, a precisely similar skill in words.