Green Knowe

Green Knowe is a series of six children's novels written by Lucy M. Boston, illustrated by her son Peter Boston, and published from 1954 and 1976. It features a very old house, Green Knowe, based on Boston's home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire. In the novels she brings to life the people who she imagines might have lived there.

For the fourth book in the series, A Stranger at Green Knowe (1961), Boston won the annual Carnegie Medal in Literature, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. She was a commended runner up for both the first and second books.

Some of the stories feature Toseland, a boy called Tolly for short, and his great-grandmother Mrs. Oldknow. Green Knowe is inhabited by the spirits of children who lived there in ages past and more than one of the spirits whom Tolly knows as children later grow into adults. Other supernatural entities in the series include the demonic tree-spirit, Green Noah (manifesting as a large tree on the grounds of the manor house), and an animated statue of St. Christopher.

The first five books were published by Faber and Faber, 1954 to 1964. Harcourt published them in the U.S., the first in 1955 and the others within the calendar year of British publication. The last book appeared after more than a decade, published by The Bodley Head and Atheneum Books in 1976.

Lucy M. Boston also completed one Green Knowe short story in 1964: "Demon at Green Knowe", in Helen Hoke, ed., Spooks, Spooks, Spooks (Franklin Watts, 1966, 0-531-01797-4).

WorldCat reports that the six Green Knowe novels are Boston's works most widely held by participating libraries, by a wide margin.