This book is part of a book series called Alice .

This book has been graded for interest at 10-13 years.

There are 416 pages in this book. This book was published 2003 by Bloomsbury USA .

J. P. Martin was born in Scarborough in 1880, the son and grandson of Methodist ministers. He had no great ambition to have his Uncle books published. To begin with they were not books, just stories which he used to tell his children in his deep Yorkshire voice, chuckling unashamedly at his own jokes. It was only when his children were grown up that he was persuaded to write them down, and it was his daughter who became determined that they should reach a wider audience and started submitting them to publishers. The books, with their anarchic spirit, were ahead of their time and it took twenty years before they finally appeared in print. Intriguingly, one publisher rejected the books on the grounds that they were amoral and said Uncle was 'a fascist' whereas The Listener, reviewing the first book, said "Uncle is a savage attack on a capitalist society. " His daughter thinks of Uncle, the rich benefactor of all his neighbours, as the fantasy of a poor man, her father, who spent most of his life in slums longing but unable to alleviate the poverty by which he was surrounded. Whatever his motives, the author himself was unconscious of them. "Lots of it came to me in dreams," he said. "I would come downstairs in the morning and remember what I had been dreaming about - and there was another chapter. " The author seems not to have been greatly affected by publication. "When your work is your calling," he said, "you don't worry much about anything else. " Even so, he was obviously delighted by the visits of local reporters and the BBC and, in particular, the children who came to see him. In all, six Uncle books were published in the series, the last in 1973, seven years after his death. Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898. Alice in Wonderland was first published in 1865. Zadie Smith is the author of three novels, most recently On Beauty, and the editor of the short-story anthology The Book of Other People.