By Rev. W. Awdry, Christopher Awdry
Dozens of short stories about Thomas, Edward, Gordon and the other engines who talk, boast, sulk, and get into scrapes. It's the original Railway Series, the books the television Thomas grew out of, gathered into one fat volume.
These are the books the television Thomas came from, not the other way around. The Reverend W. Awdry started writing them in 1945, and his son Christopher kept them going, so between them there are dozens of stories here. Each one is short and runs the same shape: an engine boasts or sulks or won't do its job, something goes wrong, and by the last page the engine has learned better and everyone's friends again. Thomas is cheeky, Gordon is big and grand, Henry sulks, James is vain, and the Fat Controller runs the whole railway and keeps them in order. There's no single long story to follow. It's a whole island of little ones, so you open it wherever you like and read a couple.
If your child already knows Thomas from the screen and the wooden track, this is where all of it started, and there's a mountain of stories to work through. Each is short enough for a tired evening. The engines have big, clear personalities a three- or four-year-old can hold onto, and the little plots are easy to follow because they all go the same way: an engine gets it wrong, then puts it right. And there are just so many of them. A Thomas-mad child could stay in fresh stories for the better part of a year.