The Little Grey Men Go Down the Bright Stream

When climate change and human interference forces four gnomes to leave their beloved home, they embark on a long, thrilling adventure that takes them over land and sea in this thrilling sequel to the first Little Grey Men book.

Sneezewort, Baldmoney, Dodder, and Cloudberry are the last gnomes in Britain. Life along the Folly Brook, where the gnomes live companionably with the birds and beasts, is wild and wet, just the way they like it. But one spring day, waking up from a long winter sleep, the gnomes are confronted by an inescapable fact: Their brook is drying up and will soon be uninhabitable.

A sequel to B.B.’s award-winning The Little Grey Men, this novel is about the gnomes’ perilous and daring search for a new home. Warwickshire and the rest of their beloved country have been despoiled by men, and the gnomes must find another place as wild and wet as their home once was.

Part fantasy, part ecological parable, The Little Grey Men Go Down the Bright Stream was first published in 1948 and remains as exciting, poignant, and far-seeing as ever.

BB (1905–1990) is the pseudonym for the British naturalist, illustrator, and children’s author Denys James Watkins-Pitchford. In 1942, he won the Carnegie Medal for British children’s books. Watkins-Pitchford was born in Lamport, Northamptonshire, where he developed a love of the great outdoors, hunting, fishing, and drawing, all of which influenced his writing. He attended the Northampton School of Art, and while there won a traveling scholarship to Paris, where he attended drawing classes and worked in a studio in Montparnasse. In 1924, he started studying at the Royal College of Art in London, and in 1930 he began working as an assistant art master at Rugby School and contributing to the Shooting Times as an illustrator and a writer. It was during this time that he adopted his nom de plume, BB, which was based on the size of the shot he used when hunting geese. In 1986, he was awarded an honorary MA by Leicester University and in 1990 was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.