James and the Giant Peach

James and the Giant Peach is a children's novel by the British writer Roald Dahl, published in 1961 with illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert.

James is living with Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, who keep him busy and keep everything else for themselves, when a stranger gives him a paper bag of magic crystals and tells him what they will do. He trips on the way back and the crystals go into the earth at the foot of a peach tree that has never produced anything, and the single peach at the top of it begins to swell until it is the size of a house. James crawls through a tunnel in the skin of the fruit and meets the creatures who have grown up with the peach: a grasshopper, a ladybird, a centipede, a spider and others, all of them the size of a person and all of them ready to leave. Dahl wrote the book for his own children, and it is deliberately strange, with songs, impossible weather and adults who get what they deserve.

It was Dahl's first book for young people, and it remains the most widely celebrated of them.