Nina Bawden was a celebrated British author whose works often explored themes of growing up and family dynamics. Her writing style, both engaging and sensitive, captured the complexities of childhood experiences alongside the gravity of life's challenges. Bawden masterfully wove adventure with profound psychological insight, resonating with readers across generations. Her ability to craft compelling characters and memorable narratives solidifies her significant place in children's and adult literature.
Nina Bawden is a longstanding author on the VMC list, but this is the first time we will publish her children's novels. Carrie's War and The Peppermint Pig are firm favourites: Keeping Henry has been out of print for years but is such a winning combination of the two earlier books that there is already an audience for this lost gem.
Both a spellbinding love story and a superb evocation of Cornwall's mythic past, Castle Dor is a book with unique and fascinating origins. It began life as the unfinished last novel of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the celebrated 'Q', and was passed by his daughter to Daphne du Maurier whose storytelling skills were perfectly suited to the task of completing the old master's tale. The result is this magical, compelling recreation of the legend of Tristan and Iseult, transplanted in time to the Cornwall of the last century. A chance encounter between the Breton onion-seller, Amyot Trestane, and the newly-wed Linnet Lewarne launches their tragic story, taking them in the fateful footsteps of the doomed lovers of Cornish legend ...
Determined to find the ex-lodger who stole his grandmother's savings, Fred McAlpine and his friends Sid, Rosie, Algy and Clio launch on a series of sleuthing activities to trace the thief.
Ben, eleven years old and the youngest of the Mallory children, has left his aunt and siblings to come to London where his widower father wishes to introduce him to his young future step-mother. Unable to return home when his brother and sister become ill, Ben is left on his own to explore the maze of walled gardens which surround his new home.
A wonderfully compelling, ironic novel about families, old age and money, with all the tempo of a thriller. číst celé
Circles of Deceit is narrated by a painter who specializes as a copyist. Major figures on the canvas are Clio, his child-bride; Helen, his first wife; and his mother Maisie. They confound lies and the truth in a subtle weave, while the silent agony of the painter's son is a poignant reflection on the busy web of deception. And as the copyist transcribes his modern versions of Old Masters, so the past keeps breaking through the surface of the present, until fact and fiction, like art and life, meet in a remarkable conclusion.
Nina Bawden's great talent is to be able to take you along a perfectly ordinary street, rip the facade away and show the strange and passionate events that go on behind closed doors' Daily Telegraph
This is Virago's first publication of one of Nina Bawden's most famous books for children. The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction, has been a great favourite since it was first published, over forty years ago.
In this, her autobiography, author Nina Bawden tells of her evacuation to Suffolk and Wales during World War II, where she was billeted with seven different families, and of her years at Oxford, where she knew Richard Burton and Margaret Thatcher.
(From the back cover blurb) 'I intended a comedy', writes Nina Bawden, ' a love story, a thriller. And maybe it's also a bit of a moral tale. You get all these elements and more in this superbly constructed and mercilessly observed comedy of George, the travel agent, who is constantly being prodded into amazement at the absurdity of his own existence.
