The book "Five Fingers" is an autobiographical work that depicts the events and feelings of the 1950s through the eyes of a five-year-old girl, Laura, when she and her parents return to Latvia after years of exile. Born in Siberia, Laura's conjured image of Latvia and her knowledge of the Latvian language had been developed in a closed environment - only in her family with her mum and dad - by the time of her return. On the one hand, Laura's joy at being in Latvia is accompanied by an abiding fear of the hunger that may return, of being deported again, of speaking rashly, of her parents' silence; on the other hand, it is the child's directness, curiosity and inquisitiveness, naive openness and awareness of her own identity, an insincere joy in seeing, knowing, understanding, even when not everything she hears is quite clear. The book has been called both an autobiographical novel and a book of childhood memories. "Laura is more Mara than she is not", as the author Māra Zālīte has admitted. The language of the child portrayed in the novel is at the same time the language of the real human child, but it is also an artistic image-making tool with all the possibilities of artistic means of expression. The aim of the paper is to describe the language of the child in M. Zālīte's autobiographical novel "Five Fingers" in its derivative and stylistic aspects. Methodologically, the presentation of the topic combines a linguistic perspective, which reveals the grammatical, stylistic and verbal aspects, with a literary-scientific characterisation of the artistic image, in which the revelation of language emerges as a pervasive motif.