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After his parents die, young David Balfour goes to the house of his uncle Ebenezer. But his uncle is a dangerous man. When he puts David on a ship to America, a difficult and dangerous time begins. But who is the stranger on the ship? Can he help David?

Fifteen-year old John Trenchard lives in a quiet village. But after dark, Moonfleet is a village with secrets. A dead man walks the streets, and smugglers do their work. When John accidentally learns about this dangerous world, his life suddenly changes. But will he live – or will he die?

Two babies are born on the same day in England. One boy is a prince and the other boy is from a very poor family. Ten years later, they change places for a game. But then the old king dies and they cannot change back. Will the poor boy be the new King of England?

Sindbad the Sailor went to sea seven times and his voyages were always dangerous. He met giant men, snakes and birds, and the Old Man of the Sea. He visited different countries and strange islands – and he told wonderful stories about his journeys.

Sheherezade is beautiful and clever. She also knows many wonderful stories: a thousand and one! Some of them are in this collection. We meet many different people in these stories: a clever servant girl, a boy judge, a stupid barber and forty bad thieves.

There are three exciting short stories in this book. They are all about … fear! Three people are in dangerous places. What can they do? Will anybody help them?

D’Artagnan wants to be a musketeer. He wants to fight for his king and his country. But the Queen has a problem with the Cardinal, so d’Artagnan and his new friends have to help her. The Cardinal is a very dangerous man. Who will win? Who will lose? And who will die?

Hans Andersen wrote many stories, and these are some of the best. We meet a very, very small child, a bird with a beautiful voice, a mermaid with legs, an ugly duckling with no friends – and an emperor with some very strange new clothes. These stories teach us lessons for life.

This is the story of an Aboriginal boy and two American children in the Australian desert. When they meet the boy, Mary and Peter learn about the desert. They follow him to food and water. But they are lost. Can they finish their journey and find their way home?

Quirky, bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which he does, with dubious success in both a former girls' school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna. It is the Berry children who grab the readers' attention, sympathies and love - all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest), John (the narrator), Lily (the writer) and Egg (the youngest). When Irving, or rather John, writes 'Frank's queer, Franny's weird, Lily's small and Egg is Egg' the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening 'yes, I know what you mean!' From there on,

Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character - a 'difficult' woman. By no means is she conventionally 'nice', but she will never be forgotten. Her story is told in three parts, each focussing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her - on Long Island in the summer of 1958 - Ruth is only four.


The second time we meet Ruth it is 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgement in men, for good reason. The book closes in 1995 when Ruth is forty-one years old, a widow and a mother. She's about to fall in love for the first time.


Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multi-layered love story of astonishing

Set among the apple orchards of rural Maine, it is a perverse world in which Homer Wells' odyssey begins. As the oldest unadopted offspring at St Cloud's orphanage, he learns about the skills which, one way or another, help young and not-so-young women, from Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder, a man of rare compassion with an addiction to ether. Dr Larch loves all his orphans, especially Homer Wells. It is Homer's story we follow, from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage, to his adult life running a cider-making factory and his strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend.