Home

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.

Cheat! Stupid! Ignorant! Liar! Matilda’s parents have called her some terrible things. The truth is, she’s a genius and they’re the stupid ones. Find out how she gets the better of them and her spiteful headmistress, Miss Trunchball, as well as discovering that she has a very special power.

Boggis, Bunce and Bean are just about the nastiest and meanest three farmers you could meet - and they hate Mr Fox! They are determined to catch him, and lie outside his hole, ready to shoot, starve or dig him out. Clever Mr Fox has other plans.

Rob is a music junkie who owns record shop in Islington. Unable to make his relationship with Laura work, he seeks refuge in the company of the two hopeless guys, and in a one night stand, only to find that life with Laura has its unexpected attractions.

Young Prince Einon is dying. Only the Great Dragon can help him! But first the boy has to say, ‘I won’t be a cruel king. I’ll love my people and be kind to them.’ But Einon is cruel, and everybody in the country is afraid. Now the Dragon, good Sir Bowen and the peasants have to fight in a great battle between Good and Bad.

The stories in this book are exciting and sometimes very strange. Some are sad and some are happy. We meet many interesting people – a young man in love, a lonely customer in a shop, a shy soldier. Strange things happen to all these people. But life is strange sometimes.