This imaginative and hilarious collection of colourful, humorous and
meticulously-illustrated cartoons captures with great affection both the joys
and frustrations of caring for these lifelong companions.
Orphaned Oliver lives in a cold, grim workhouse, until the day he dares to ask for more. Escaping to London, Oliver finds new friends and thinks he has a home at last. But his troubles are only just beginning.
Read it yourself is a series of popular, traditional tales written in a simple way for children who are learning to read. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is at level 4, which contains longer stories for more fluent readers.
Cranford is a rich, comic and illuminating portrait of life in a small town in early Victorian times. Mrs Gaskell presents us with a society that was disappearing because of the onward march of the Industrial Revolution. While the dark clouds of urbanisation and the advance of the railway hover threateningly on the horizon, the inhabitants of Cranford, predominantly women, resolutely refuse to embrace change. Gaskell shows that in their apparently simple ordered lives they face many emotional dilemmas and upheavals. It is the drama of the minutiae that is both appealing and illuminating, revealing as it does that great emotions can by stirred by what to the outside world are minor matters.