The Roundabout Man, By Clare Morrall

Glittering reflections of the past in a chapel window

Clare Morrall is a novelist with a soft spot for the diffident and the disturbed. Her latest misfit, Quinn, is a 60-year-old tramp who has taken up residence on a busy roundabout.

He's the son of a famous children's writer, Larissa Smith, and boy-hero of her six books. But "Mumski" was a distant mother in the Enid Blyton mould, and Quinn has been tackling the consequences of her haughty neglect since.

By turns sorrowful and funny, Morrall's very readable novel follows Quinn as he attempts to recall a childhood whose dramas were appropriated in the name of literature.