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

CLASSIC FICTION (PRE C 1945). A historical romance, this novel tells of the adventures of the hot-headed young Gascon, d'Artagnan and his three companions Athos, Porthos and Aramis as they gallantly defend the Queen of France, using their wit and their swords.

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a ‘T’. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks – not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.’s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian ‘clerking classes’, it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.

The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is stranded on an uninhabited island far away from any shipping routes. With patience and ingenuity, he transforms his island into a tropical paradise. For twenty-four years he has no human company, until one Friday, he rescues a prisoner from a boat of cannibals.

Jonathan Harker's visit to mysterious Count Dracula's eerie castle in Transylvania is just the start of a insidious plan to send vampires to England.

"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.