Tom's Midnight Garden

Tom's Midnight Garden is a children's fantasy novel by the English writer Philippa Pearce, first published in 1958 by Oxford University Press with illustrations by Susan Einzig.

Tom Long has been sent to stay with his aunt and uncle, who live in a large old house that has been divided into flats, because his brother has measles and he cannot stay at home. There is no garden, only a paved yard and some bins, and the household runs on his aunt's fear of noise. On the night the hall clock strikes thirteen, Tom gets up, finds the back door unlocked and walks into a Victorian garden belonging to the house as it used to be, where he meets a girl named Hatty and plays. Each night he returns, and each night the garden and Hatty have moved on in time, so that the two of them are growing up at different speeds. Pearce keeps the two worlds separate and lets the reader work out what the connection is.

Pearce wrote the book out of places she had known, including the house in the story, and it is one of the children's novels most often named when writers are asked what made them want to write.