Elizabeth Laird

Peter Bailey

Eleven-year-old Solomon loves to run! The great athletes of the Ethiopian national team are his heroes and he dreams that one day he will be a gold-medal-winning athlete like them, in spite of his ragged shorts and bare feet. When his grandfather announces that he's going to take Solomon to Addis Ababa, Solomon cannot believe his ears. A trip to the capital? It's unfathomable. Solomon's joy is increased when he realizes that the Ethiopian running team will be doing a victory parade through the city that day. Maybe he'll get a glimpse of Haile Gebrselassie or Derartu Tulu?! But Solomon's grandfather has other plans. As Solomon follows him through the big, overwhelming streets, he learns something he cannot believe. The strict old man is a war hero who once risked his life to save a friend and has been in hiding ever since. When grandfather collapses, Solomon knows that getting help from his village is up to him. It's a twenty-mile run from the city to home, and grandfather's life hangs in the balance. Can the small bare-footed runner with the big heart do it?

The Fastest Boy in the World

Angela McAllister

Cal is a Silvertail. She never knew her mother, Sylla, and does not know that with her dying breath Sylla bequeathed her daughter the power of the Merrows - the means to battle an evil that threatens the entire ocean. When Cal meets Jake, a Creeper from the Overbreath, the two are drawn to one another. Cal, like the rest of the merfolk, is astounded when Jake is able to join them beneath the waves. Could he be the one that legend speaks of? The Tide Turner who will save their world? Time is not on their side as Cal and Jake seek the truth about themselves and their destiny... In an extraordinary adventure which spans gloomy caverns in the fathomless heart of the ocean, breathtaking chases by battalions of deadly marlin, from escaping the renegade Bloodfins, hiding among shoals of panicking silver tuna to flying over coral reefs on the wings of Cal's ray, Stinger, Angela McAllister has created a stunning underwater world, full of danger and excitement and a magical fantasy story steeped in mermaid lore, myth and legend. And never far away prowls Orcara, the terrifying sea witch, who has a secret of her own.

The Tide Turner

Philip Pullman

Helene Bützow

Olin rotta!, eli, Punaiset kengät

Paul Kieve

Ever since the author Paul Kieve was given a magic set at the age of ten, he has been buying magic books, props and posters and honing his skills as a magician. He keeps all his magical paraphenalia in his house in Hackney, right around the corner from the magnificent Hackney Empire, a venue played at by all the great illusionists of the golden era of magic, some hundred years ago. One day, as Paul is on the phone to his friend, sitting in his 'Poster Room', chatting to a friend about how well his magic show went from the night before, he gets a strange sensation . . . Suddenly, the huge figure of Alexander steps out of the poster and starts telling Paul off for getting too big-headed! Alexander and the other brilliant magicians in the posters are going to show Paul what magic is really about!

A Tale of Magnificent Magicians and Their Amazing Feats

Hocus Pocus

Trick Daddy

“A thug is someone who stands on his own. He lives by the decisions he makes and accepts the consequences. A thug is comfortable in his own skin. I wear mine like a glove.” Trick Daddy was born a thug—just a stone’s throw from downtown Miami, yet a world away from its dazzling beauty and sparkling wealth. Where grinding poverty, deadly crime, and devastating racial tension taught kids to live by the ’hood rules. Remarkably, Trick came from nothing and made it big just when his chances had run out. Magic City is the extraordinary tale of a boy whose father was a pimp, who learned to hustle to survive, and whose only role model was his brother, the drug dealer he watched plying his trade on the block. It’s the untold truth behind the cult movie Scarface, of the drug money that transformed the city into a shining mecca for the rich and famous while turf wars between smalltime pushers claimed countless lives. It’s also the incredible story of how that potent mixture of extremes—the electric pulse and glittering abundance of South Beach and the crime, corruption, and despair in its shadows—gave rise to the most dominant sound in hip-hop today. Magic City is an ode to Miami, a riveting tale of a paradise lost and a native son determined to infuse it with new life.

Trials of a Native Son

Magic City

Patricia Finney

Living a quiet and contented life in suburbia, Jack the dog suddenly finds himself in a whirlwind of emotion after beautiful Petra moves in next door, in a funny romance about a dog in love. Reprint.

I, Jack

Tony Mitton

When twins Toby and Tess meet a mysterious old traveller, they are fascinated by his magical tales of far-off places, strange enchantments, and miracles.

The Storyteller's Secrets

Personalities and emotions clash violently when two men from different backgrounds meet in the Far East and ambition dominates sullen adversity until humbled in a court of law. Relationships do not improve when the men discover they share the same woman. Reduced to an elemental struggle one prospers materially while the other succeeds in love, or does he?

'Fortune's Bastard'

Good luck follows three stranded space travellers on Planet Cimarron when they rescue Raken Trigine from enemies hoping to usurp his throne. Good fortune and success continue until they receive an unsettling message that might blight their future.

'Cimarron'

Sian Bailey

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Chris McEwan

Carol Lawson

Heroic, tragic, fantastical, funny, cautionary and mythical ... Whatever your choice of story, there's a poem here for you, because 'Once Upon a Poem' brings together some of the best stories told in verse! From the magical 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll to Roald Dahl's wicked retelling of Goldilocks, stunningly illustrated in colour and championed by today's best authors. Voted one of the best storybooks in 2004 by Books for Keeps.

Favourite Poems that Tell Stories

Once Upon a Poem

'Once Upon A Poem' brings together 15 stories told in verse. From 'Paul Revere's Ride' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll; to Roald Dahl's wicked retelling of 'Goldilocks' and a rap version of 'Prince Theseus' by Tony Mitton.

Jamila Gavin

Grandpa Chatterji is a loveable grandparent who comes from Calcutta to stay with his family in England.

Grandpa Chatterji's Third Eye

Gordon Snell

Lottie and Max are so incensed by the damage done to animals by people and pollution that they decide to send a letter of protest to the Queen of the World—a letter signed and delivered by all the animals. This colorful, child-friendly book with catchy text shows off a wonderful procession of birds and beasts.

Lottie's Letter

Hans Christian Andersen

First two titles in a new series of best-loved Hans Christian Andersen stories, now in the Orchard Fairy Tales format. Each book contains two stories: THE LITTLE MERMAID / THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES / THE TINDER BOX These direct, accessible retellings by Andrew Matthews are pacy and full of humour, and ideal for 7-9 year olds. Forming a useful teaching resource of traditional tales, they are perfectly complemented by Peter Bailey's classic can humorous illustrations.

And, The Tinder Box

The Emperor's New Clothes

Alexander McCall Smith

Includes brilliant baboon facts! Akimbo loves his life in Africa and the animals that live there. In this newest Akimbo story, a lady comes to study the baboons in the game reserve where Akimbo's father is the head ranger. Akimbo is keen to help and find out all he can about baboons - and in so doing comes closer to a much more dangerous animal …

Akimbo and the Baboons

Long ago in Germany, a storyteller's story and an apprentice clockwork-maker's nightmare meet in a menacing, lifelike figure created by the strange Dr. Kalmenius.

Or All Wound Up

Clockwork

Fiona Waters

Fairies and wizards, spells and surprises! This treasury of troublesome baby dragons, charmed cities and a boy whose magic fiddle makes people dance is sure to entrance all aspiring spell makers and breakers. Thirteen stories from all aorund the world - from fiary tales and folk legends to modern magical tales - conjure up a bewitching brew of mystery and enchantment.

The Kingfisher Treasury of Magical Stories

Nick Ward

This beautifully told original tale follows the trials of a little boy formed from ice, who must learn to live with people. Full color.

The Ice Child

For three decades, no American filmmaker has been as prolific—or as paradoxical—as Woody Allen. From Play It Again, Sam (1972) through Celebrity (1998) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Allen has produced an average of one film a year, yet in many of these films Allen reveals a progressively skeptical attitude toward both the value of art and the cultural contributions of artists. In examining Allen’s filmmaking career, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen demonstrates that his movies often question whether the projected illusions of magicians/artists benefit audience or artists. Other Allen films dramatize the opposed conviction that the consoling, life-redeeming illusions of art are the best solution humanity has devised to the existential dilemma of being a death-foreseeing animal. Peter Bailey demonstrates how Allen’s films repeatedly revisit and reconfigure this tension between image and reality, art and life, fabrication and factuality, with each film reaching provisional resolutions that a subsequent movie will revise. Merging criticism and biography, Bailey identifies Allen's ambivalent views of the artistic enterprise as a key to understanding his entire filmmaking career. Because of its focus upon filmmaker Sandy Bates’s conflict between entertaining audiences and confronting them with bleak human actualities, Stardust Memories is a central focus of the book. Bailey’s examination of Allen’s art/life dialectic also draws from the off screen drama of Allen’s very public separation from Mia Farrow, and the book accordingly construes such post-scandal films as Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite as Allen’s oblique cinematic responses to that tabloid tempest. By illuminating the thematic conflict at the heart of Allen's work, Bailey seeks not only to clarify the aesthetic designs of individual Allen films but to demonstrate how his oeuvre enacts an ongoing debate the screenwriter/director has been conducting with himself between creating cinematic narratives affirming the saving powers of the human imagination and making films acknowledging the irresolvably dark truths of the human condition.

Peter Bailey

About

Books

Join the club