The book is a children’s fairy tale about toys with magic powers. A toy shop hidden in an old village deep in the countryside is rumoured to have magic powers. Every toy that enters the toy shop, either to be mended or sold is given the power to move and talk to other toys. But the magic power only happens when children and adults are not around. The children that live in the village somehow know that that is true, without having any real proof. All the parents are convinced that it is the children spreading the rumours, until they experience strange happens with their children’s toys. Many of the toys have their own story to tell, including dolls, robots and unicorns, as well as the children who own them and Nancy and Tom, the shop owners Michael’s dad is determined the find out the truth about these magic powers and secretly sets up a video camera in his son’s play room during the night, with the story ending with a surprising twist.

From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, a startling tale of the redemptive power of physical and emotional love One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Uncle Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative work.

A twirling ballerina and a tin soldier fall in love in a magical toyshop, and when fate separates them the other toys devise a plan to reunite them. Four pop-up scenes unfold to form a panorama.