Slingsby’s final work, A Concise Compendium of Wonder is a triptych of stories loosely based on Hansel & Gretel by the Brothers Grimm, Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl.

Not unlike Bryan Forbes’ 1961 film, Whistle Down the Wind, it places children at the moral and imaginative centre of its universe, not as naïve innocents, but as bearers of truth in a world where adult certainty is compromised by fear, legalism and a loss of imagination.

The stories span millennia, from famine-ravaged medieval Europe to a lunar colony in the year 3099. Throughout, the children’s kinship with nature and their courage in questioning inherited ‘truths’ provide a powerful counterpoint to adult authority. However, while celebrating agency and resilience as well as maintaining a sense of wonder, the stories never shy away from the consequences of human folly.

Slingsby’s Wandering Hall of Possibility. Photo © Alex Frayne

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