Diane Mowat Book order

Now The Children of Green Knowe and River at Green Knowe are available in one edition. Children of Green KnoweTolly's great grandmother isn't a witch, but both she and her old house, Green Knowe, are full of a very special kind of magic.

Vanity Fair, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.

Suitable for younger learners Word count 5,310

Suitable for younger learners Word count 10,710 Bestseller

The classic story of the four adventurous 17th century Frenchmen Porthos, Athos, and Aramis and the dashing would-be musketeer D'Artagnan adapted for children.

'I did not intend to write a funny book, at first' wrote Jerome J. Jerome of Three Men in a Boat, which has since become a comic classic. When J. the narrator, George, Harris and Montmorency the dog set off on their hilarious misadventures, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts, imaginary illnesses, butter pats and tins of pineapple chunks. Denounced as vulgar by the literary establishment, Three Men in a Boat nevertheless caught the spirit of the times. The expansion of education and the increase in office workers created a new mass readership, and Jerome's book was especially popular among the 'clerking classes' who longed to be 'free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life.' So popular did it prove that Jerome reunited his heroes for a bicycle tour of Germany. Despite some sharp, and with hindsight, prophetic observations of the country, Three Men on the Bummel describes an equally picaresque journey constrained only 'by the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started'.

The adventures of Robinson Crusoe who was marooned on a desert island for twenty years.

Count Dracula is a vampire. He drinks people's blood. He lives in a lonely castle in the mountains of Transylvania. But then he comes to England and strange things start happening. People change. People become ill. Professor Van Helsing knows about vampires, but can he stop Count Dracula?

"If you wake up in the night and hear a tap running somewhere in the house, what to you do? You get up, of course, and go and turn the tap off. A little later you hear the tap running again. You are alone in the house, and you know you turned the tap off. What do you think? The ghosts in these stories all have unfinished business with the living world. They come back from the grave to continue their work, to keep a promise, to look for something they have lost. Sometimes they want to help people, sometimes they want to punish them - or kill them."--Back cover

When a group of English schoolchildren are told that they are to be in a tetrathlon (swimming, running, shooting and riding) against the perfect Greycoats school, they are totally unenthusiastic but rally when a teacher encourages them.