Five Children and It

Five Children and It is a children's fantasy novel by the English writer E. Nesbit. It appeared in the Strand Magazine from April to December 1902 under the title The Psammead, or the Gifts and was published as a book the same year.

The children have moved from London to a house in the country and are left largely to themselves, which is how they come to be digging in a gravel pit and to find a creature called a Psammead who has lived there since prehistoric times. It grants wishes, but only one a day, and the wishes last only until sunset, which is the mechanism the book runs on: the children wish for beauty, for money, for wings, for a castle, and each time the wish works and brings complications they cannot undo. Nesbit writes them as ordinary children with ordinary quarrels, and the comedy comes from the mismatch between what they asked for and what they meant. The book was one of the first in which children in a contemporary setting meet magic and behave as children.

It is the first of three books about the same family, followed by The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet, and Nesbit's method of putting magic into an ordinary English holiday influenced a great many writers afterwards.