Lucy Mangan

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Missouri

A Memoir of Childhood Reading

A love letter to the joys of childhood reading from Wonderland to Narnia.

When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one.

She was whisked away to Narnia - and Kirrin Island - and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy, and played by the tracks with the Railway Children. With Charlotte's Web she discovered Death and with Judy Blume it was Boys. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library or to spend her pocket money on amassing her own at home.

In Bookworm, Lucy revisits her childhood reading with wit, love and gratitude. She relives our best-beloved books, their extraordinary creators, and looks at the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. She also disinters a few forgotten treasures to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way.

Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life - prompting endless re-readings, rediscoveries, and, inevitably, fierce debate - and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm.

'Passionate, witty, informed, and gloriously opinionated' Jacqueline Wilson author of The Story of Tracy Beaker

Bookworm

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Martin Edwards

And Other Seasonal Mysteries

Who Killed Father Christmas?

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M. Edwards

Suprise for Christmas A

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Christmas is a mysterious, as well as magical, time of year. Strange things can happen, and this helps to explain the hallowed tradition of telling ghost stories around the fireside as the year draws to a close. Christmas tales of crime and detection have a similar appeal. This book introduces readers to some of the finest Christmas detective stories of the past.

Silent Nights

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British Library

In the night the snow came. She awoke on Christmas morning in that unmistakable light, coming up from the earth and shining between her curtains. Celebrate Christmas through the creative minds of a host of authors, including Beryl Bainbridge, Maeve Binchy, Richmal Crompton, Alice Munro and Elizabeth von Arnim. From the delightful consequences of decorating the tree by Stella Gibbons to a disorientating encounter at 35,000 feet on a Christmas Day flight by Muriel Spark, an amateur pantomime by Stella Margetson and a New Year's resolution by Alice Childress, these stories are sure to fortify you over the Christmas period. Stories for Christmas and the Festive Season explores the joys and disappointments, pressures and preparations of this time of year from a female perspective. In keeping with the spirit of the series, the stories are plucked from different decades of the twentieth century and penned by familiar as well as forgotten authors writing for both books and popular magazines. The British Library Women Writers series is a curated collection of novels by female authors who enjoyed broad, popular appeal in their day. In a century during which the role of women in society changed radically, their fictional heroines highlight women's experience of life inside and outside the home through the decades in these rich, insightful and evocative stories.

Stories for Christmas and the Festive Season

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