Victorian church and find a portal to the magical realm of Elidor. In Elidor, they are entrusted by King Malebron to help rescue four treasures which have been stolen by the forces of evil, who are attempting to take control of the kingdom. The children succeed and return to Manchester with the treasures, but are pursued by the malevolent forces who need the items to seal their victory. Before writing Elidor, Garner had seen a dinner service set which could be arranged to make pictures of either flowers or owls. Inspired by this design, he produced his fourth novel, The Owl Service. The story, which was heavily influenced by the Medieval Welsh tale of Math fab Mathonwy from the Mabinogion, was critically acclaimed, winning both the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. It also sparked discussions among critics as to whether Garner should properly be considered a children's writer, given that this book in particular was deemed equally suitable for an adult readership. It took Garner six years to write his next novel, Red Shift. The book centres on three intertwined love stories, one set in the present, another during the English Civil War, and the third in the second century CE. Philip referred to it as "a complex book but not a complicated one: the bare lines of story and emotion stand clear". Academic specialist in children's literature Maria Nikolajeva characterised Red Shift as "a difficult book" for an unprepared reader, identifying its main themes as those of "loneliness and failure to communicate". Ultimately, she thought that repeated re-readings of the novel bring about the realisation that "it is a perfectly realistic story with much more depth and psychologically more credible than the most so-called "realistic" juvenile novels." The Stone Book series and folkloric collections: 1974–94 From 1976 to 1978, Garner published a series of four novellas, which have come to be collectively known as The Stone Book quartet: The Stone Book, Granny Reardun, The Aimer Gate, and Tom Fobble's Day. Each focused on a day in the life of a child in the Garner family, each from a different generation. In a 1989 interview, Garner noted that although writing The Stone Book Quartet had been "exhausting", it had been "the most rewarding of everything" he'd done to date. Philip described the quartet as "a complete command of the material he had been working and reworking since the