Mercy needs to stand up for herself. She also needs a miracle.

Eleven-year-old Mercy lives with her eccentric foster aunts – two elderly sisters so poor they can afford only one lightbulb. A nasty housing developer is eyeing their house, which suddenly starts falling apart – just as Aunt Flora does too. She’s forgetting words, names and even how to behave in public. Mercy tries to keep her head down at school but when a classmate frames her for stealing the school’s raffle money, Mercy’s teachers decide to take a closer look at her home life. With the help of a neighbour, Mr Singh, who teaches Mercy about Gandhi and his principles of passive resistance, Mercy finds a tool that can help solve her problems.

But first, like Gandhi, she needs to stand up for herself. She also needs a miracle. And to summon it she has to find her voice and tell the truth – and that truth is neither pure nor simple.

A book that already feels like a classic, Small Mercies holds a strong message for children today. Full of heart, it will shine among the best children's literature for years to come.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard SelectionFrom the award-winning author of Small Mercies, named a Best Middle-Grade Book of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews "I've decided that some people put out fires and leave the world cold and hopeless and others nurse the kindling, blow like mad and fan the flames with whatever they have at hand - so that everyone feels its warmth." A lot of things can feel just out of reach in 12-year-old Boipelo Seku's small, impoverished village of Cedarville, South Africa. The idea of one day living in a house that's big enough for his family is just a faraway dream. But when Boi stumbles on a story about a Canadian man who traded his way from a paperclip to a house, Boi hatches his own trading plan starting with a tiny clay cow he molded from river mud. Trade by trade, Boi and his best friend Potso discover that even though Cedarville lacks so many of the things that made the paperclip trade possible, it is fuller than either of them ever imagined. In a chain of events that turns Boi's tiny spark into a warming fire, Boi learns the power of friendship and community, and finds that something's value isn't in what you can trade for it, but in the good it brings to the people you love. With a motley crew of characters, wholehearted humor, and a whole lot of hope, The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Swap is a joyful read for lovers of The Penderwicks or classics like The Moffats.

When Boipelo reads about a Canadian man who trades a red paper clip on the Internet for a house, he decides to try a similar idea in his village. He starts trading with a clay cow and ends up with... an unexpected result. Can he bear the embarrassment of the whole village laughing at his idea? How will he fix his relationship with his best friend? Will the girl he admires think he's an idiot? And will he dodge the shady deals that people want him to make.