A captivating, powerful and luminous story from a bestselling, award-winning author about a mother, a daughter, and the great Greenland shark. With mesmerising black and yellow illustrations and presented as a deluxe hardback with tracing paper inserts, this is a perfect gift for 9+ fans of David Almond and Frances Hardinge.
When Jessica's best friend goes off with new-girl Amelia, Jessica is hurt but determined not to take it lying down. She has a plan, and a secret weapon - her felt-tips. The pen is mightier than the sword, after all, and having a sense of humour wins Jessica far more friends than she loses.
"Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet. Drawing on her long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, Maggie O'Farrell writes Hamnet as a luminous portrait of a marriage and at its heart the loss of a beloved child."--Publisher description.
After the men in an Arctic Norwegian town are wiped out, the women must survive a sinister threat in this "perfectly told" 1600s parable of "a world gone mad" (Adriana Trigiani). Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later, a stranger arrives on their shore. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband's authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God, and flooded with a mighty evil. As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence. Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials, The Mercies is a story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization. One of the Best Books of the Year USA Today Good Housekeeping
Set at the heart of the treacherous political world of the Italian Renaissance, this is the masterful story of a young woman's battle for her very survival, written with all the drama and verve that made HAMNET an international bestseller.
