James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

James and the Giant Peach is a popular childeren novel written in 1961 by British author Roald dahl. The first edition, published by Alfred Knopf, featured illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. There have been reillustrated versions of it over the years, done by Michael Simeon (for the first British edition), Emma Chichester clark, Lane smith and Quentin Blake. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1996 (the insect characters’ art style being Smith’s) which was co-produced by Tim Burton, and a musical in 2010.

The plot centres on a young English orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal cross-world adventure with seven magically altered garden bugs he meets. Dahl was originally going to write about a giant cherry, but changed it to James and the Giant Peach because a peach is “prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry.”^[1][2] Because of the story’s occasional macabre and potentially frightening content, it has become a regular target of censors.^[3][4]