Vera wants a reading bench beneath the chestnut tree. Joep wants a football goal and an election victory. Eef is counting broken spades. And Miep? She mostly wants apples. Twelve chapters of ambitious promises, a runaway speech and a bench that won’t build itself.
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Vera had never shaken the sand out of a book before. Jumpers, yes. And once her trainer, which had been full of sand after she’d been playing. But a book?
She held it over the bin and gave it a gentle shake. A thin trickle fell from between the pages. In the picture of a very grand king, one grain remained perched on the end of his nose.