Pauline Francis Books

Developed in consultation with Alison Kelly, who is a senior lecturer in education and an early reading specialist from Roehampton University. There are over 250 Young Reading titles; view them at our website: www.usborne.com.

A book about growing up which has delighted generations of young readers. The illustrations by Ella Bailey are perfect for the modern audience. This edition includes extra material for young readers. The four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy – live in financial hardship in New England with their mother, while their father has been drafted to fight in the Civil War. The girls embark on a series of adventures and endure a number of unexpected misfortunes – experiences that allow their personalities to emerge: Meg sensible and outgoing, Jo literary and boyish, Beth musical and shy, and Amy artistic and selfish – but the bonds holding together the March family remain unbroken. Initially written as a novel for girls, Little Women is now regarded as an all-time American classic for all readers, inspiring generations of women writers and giving rise to many adaptations.

Newspaper reporter Ed Malone is looking for an adventure. He finds it when he agrees to go to the Amazon jungle wuth the famous Professor Challenger and two others. On this fantastic journey of adventure and danger, the four men find a Lost World - a world of prehistoric animals and of danger. A classic story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The 'Fast Track Classics' series presents retold, shortened versions of classic novels that are suitable for children working at Key Stage Two. The stories are retold so as to lose none of the strength and character of the originals.

During a voyage in the 1600's, an Englishman becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lives for nearly thirty years on a deserted island before being rescued.

The voyages of an Englishman carry him to such strange places as Lilliput, where people are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land of giants; and a country ruled by horses.

An abridged version of the classic underwater adventure of Captain Nemo and his submarine, The Nautilus.

Story of London underworld and a boy's struggle to escape from the environment of crime.

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.

In seeking to discover his inner self, the brilliant Dr Jekyll discovers a monster. First published to critical acclaim in 1886, this mesmerising thriller is a terrifying study of the duality of man's nature.