Five Children and It

Its eyes were on long horns
like a snail's eyes… it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body
was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick, soft fur… and it had
hands and feet like a monkey's. ‘It’ was the Psammead,
the grumpy sand-fairy that could, if in the mood, grant a wish a day.
When the five children befriend him they find that each wish granted
often has a sting in its tail. Golden guineas are too difficult to
spend, wings let them down in a most inconvenient way, and when they
wish for Red Indians, the children forget that they can sometimes be a
little warlike. Generations of children have come to
love the fantasy and the whimsy of the stories in the classic book from
the author of The Railway Children.