Short answers, pulled from the story.
The main characters are Arrietty Clock, a fourteen-year-old Borrower who reads and owns pocket-sized books, and The Boy, a ten-year-old boy recovering from an illness in India. Their parents are Pod, a talented shoemaker, and Homily, a nervous woman who maintains a tidy domestic world.
The Borrowers novel by Mary Norton was published in 1952 and won the Carnegie Medal that same year. The book celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2007 and was named one of the top ten Medal-winning works.
Pod and Homily Clock live under the floor beneath a grandfather clock, which gives them their surname. They reside in the walls and floors of a quiet English house where they borrow items from the Big People to survive.
The Borrowers borrow items from Big People to survive because they are a diminished people living in a decaying Big House. Their existence is precarious as they must avoid detection by Big People who can destroy them with a single cat or a rat catcher.
The story ends years later when Mrs May finds a miniature memoranda book written by Arrietty that proves the Borrowers' existence and their survival. The book has identical handwriting to The Boy's, leaving the reader with a sense of wonder and the enduring mystery of their hidden world.