A Handful of Thieves

'The school where I first met Cora Ravenwing was called Okington School, and I was just beginning to have real ideas and opinions of my own when I first went ...

A gripping wartime adventure story for young readers, The Dolphin Crossing (first published in 1967) marked the fiction debut of Jill Paton Walsh, subsequently a celebrated author of detective stories ...

First published in 1972 (as The Popinjay Stairs), this novel set in Restoration England is one of the finest productions in Geoffrey Trease's long and distinguished career as a ...

'It is a strange and terrible thing to listen to one's own funeral service ...'

The year is 1290: sixteen year-old Robin of Westwood has been declared a leper, and ...

In the peaceful English countryside of 1859, fifteen-year-old Mark Apperley is bored of life with his overbearing grandmother. His plan to escape brings about dramatic results: he is sent away ...

If ideas are more dangerous than material things, what happens when ideas become matter?

Near a crossroad in the country town of Smetham, a retired philosopher is felled by what ...

In his masterly survey, Written for Children , John Rowe Townsend describes A Game of Dark as ‘ambitious and harrowing’. His outline can’t be bettered. ‘Donald Jackson, nearly fifteen, suffers ...

First published in 1931, this fascinating story is one of Charles Williams' early 'metaphysical' novels. Set in London, Sir Giles, the nefarious cousin of The Chief Justice of England, Lord ...

All over Athens the cocks were crowing, the sky was turning from dark-blue to oyster-grey, and the city was waking to one of its great events, the annual festival in ...

The Leopard and the Cliff has been out of print for a long time with second-hand copies being elusive; nonetheless it has a grim resonance with today demonstrating the futility ...

An old legend provides the clues for this delightful treasure hunt in the Yorkshire dales. The seekers are Nan and Mary from the farm, Peter from the inn, and Adam ...

Judith and Mick live at New Scar House with their large family. Bob and Dick live at the farm at Ravensgill with their grandmother. The children go the same school ...

‘This is a book about childhood, but it is not a mere literary essay, it is a work of the widest learning, exploring the whole field of the subject ... a ...

At the age of eleven, Jack is resigned to his world. So what if he can never satisfy his mother’s desire for perfection as his brother can? So what ...

There had never been such a low tide at Jade Bay. It left fish on dry land and a wreck high on a rock, which must be the treasure ship ...

‘No food, all lost,’ said the girl. ‘We die ever so soon.’ She sat on the trunk of a fallen tree. ‘No mans here,’ she said. ‘Land of bears, all ...

‘I don’t see why I should be Beekeeper, Owen thought, just because Crew is away from school with mumps and I’m the youngest Singing Boy in the school ...

Rose feels as if she’s been drifting along in a strange, numb dream ever since her mother’s death.

Suddenly, however, her life is rocked by changes - for good ...

Desert Islands opens with a captivating essay on the romance of islands and castaways in literature and life, and the associations that have arisen in the imagination of readers in ...

In the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature it says of James Reeves, 'His real achievement, however, lies in his poetry, which is generally regarded as the best British "serious ...