Anne of Green Gables

An elderly brother and sister on Prince Edward Island send to the orphanage for a boy to help with the farm and are sent an eleven-year-old girl instead. They keep her. That is the whole premise, and the book spends the next three hundred pages on what happens to a household when somebody talkative and imaginative moves into it.

Anne is one of the great comic creations in children's literature — she names things, she holds grudges magnificently, she breaks a slate over a boy's head for calling her carrots and refuses to speak to him for five years. Montgomery lets her be genuinely annoying, which is what keeps her likeable. The set pieces are domestic disasters: the hair dye, the cordial that was not cordial, the cake with liniment in it.

Underneath the comedy is a quieter book about Marilla, who has no idea how to love a child and learns anyway, mostly by doing it badly first. The last chapters turn without warning, and the final line is one of the most quoted in Canadian writing. It is a children's book that adults keep coming back to for the second story rather than the first.