But Cyril merely observed that his sister must have gone off her nut, and he and Robert dug with spades while Anthea sat on the edge of the hole, jumping up and down with hotness and anxiety.

NPR: Excerpt: 'Five Children and It'

The obsession of the novel's characters with degrees of skin colour, or the lack thereof, threatens to force the heroine, a near-white black, to call off her planned marriage to a white jazz musician and instead to encourage the crude advances of a nut-brown man with three daughters.

ECONOMIST: Dorothy West