The Machine-Gunners

Author	Pauline Clarke
ISBN	0698201175

Beneath a floorboard in the old farmhouse into which his family has just moved, eight-year-old Max Morley discovers twelve time-worn wooden soldiers. Under his careful watch, the "Twelves" come to life, each possessing a name and a distinct personality. As Max soon learns, they share a history filled...

Author	A.L. Kennedy
ISBN	0224077864

Ms Kennedy should have a category of her own with different coloured stars, or the option to have the stars squared, 3D at the very least. She's a writer who expects a lot of her reader, and I like that. The opening chapter of this novel is a struggle, even the second time round it's not a smooth ride, no familiar...

Author

Patricia Wrightson

Few books had as profound an impact on me when I was growing up. This haunting tale of a lonely boy discovering an ancient stone Nargun, a creature straight from Aboriginal mythology, on his uncle's rural property had me spellbound. It still does. Wrightson, who died in 2010, was criticised for using...

Author

John Harris

They joined for their country. They fought for each other.

When war breaks out in 1914, Mark Fenner and his Sheffield friends immediately flock to Kitchener's call. Amid waving flags and boozy celebration, the three men - Fen, his best friend Locky and self-assured Frank, rival for the woman...

Author	K.M. Peyton
ISBN	0192750232

Christina and Will have escaped Flambards for London with their heads full of dreams, only to find a whole new set of problems. Not only the basic ones of work and a place to live, but Will's single-minded ambition to desing and pilot flying machines, which terrify Christina every time he leaves the ground....

Author	Leon Garfield
ISBN	0374467625

This brilliant, picaresque novel follows the adventures of an illiterate young ragamuffin known only as Smith. Smith picks the pocket of a stranger, only to witness immediately the strangers murder. Smiths booty from the theft is an Important Document, no doubt worth quite a lot to somebody, which...

Author	Thomas Keneally
ISBN	0060122994

This must be one of the best things Keneally has ever done and how it avoided winning the Booker is simply mesmerizing. This Australian author really has no right to go about writing on such a closely-studied and well-documented theme as the American Civil War and the various side issues that went along...

Author	Nina Bawden
ISBN	0140364560

Albert, Carrie and young Nick are war-time evacuees whose lives get so tangled up with the people they've come to live among that the war and their real families seem to belong to another world. Carrie and Nick are billeted in Wales with old Mr Evans, who is so mean and cold, and his timid mouse of a sister,...

Author	William Golding
ISBN	0571225411

To the Ends of the Earth, William Golding's classic sea trilogy, tells the extraordinary story of a warship's troubled journey to Australia in the early 1800s. Told through the pages of Edmund Talbot's journal - with equal measures of wit and disdain - it records the mounting tensions and growing misfortunes...

Author	Peter Dickinson
ISBN	0552528129

An attack in the dark, screams, burning huts...Thirteen-year-old Theodore crouches under the trees. His father's Mission has been destroyed. His father is dead. Theodore is on his own, fleeing the Chinese rebels of the Boxer uprising.Then Mrs Jones appears. A botanist, Mrs Jones is a feisty, aging,...

Author	Frederick Marryat
ISBN	1853261106

It is strange when there is a connection found between dissimilar things in our everyday life. While I was reading this book by Frederick Marryat, I read on a plaque on my nightly rounds at the museum that the artist Thomas Chambers used Marryat's naval writings as an inspiration for some of his seascapes....

Author	Richard Aldington
ISBN	0701206047

First published in 1929, Death of a Hero was described by its author as both a jazz novel and a memorial to a generation. The hero is George Winterbourne. Leaving the Edwardian gloom of his embattled parents behind him, George escapes to Soho, which buzzes, on the eve of war, with talk of politics, pacifism...

Author	Penelope Lively
ISBN	1405225424

Annual re-read. First encountered at the age of ten, in primary school (in fact I still have Mrs. Halsall's own copy, sorry, Miss) and loved since. Lively's enduring ghost story tells of James Harrison being haunted by a bad-tempered C17th poltergeist whose distaste of the modern world manifests itself...

Author	C. Day-Lewis
ISBN	0435120018

“This is a really super story—I shold know, I wrote it. My name is George, and I’m Ted’s second-in-command: Ted is is centre-forward of the Junior XI at King’s School in Otterbury and a first class chap. He’s the leader of our company, and the story began with our battle against Toppy’s...

Author	Susan Price
ISBN	0571153402

“In a place far distant from where you are now grows an oak-tree by a lake.
Round the oak’s trunk is a chain of golden links.
Tethered to the chain is a learned cat, and this most learned of all cats walks round and round the tree continually.
As it walks one way, it sings songs.
As it walks...

Author	Gillian Rubinstein
ISBN	0689806027

After Tod's father abandoned the family, his mother moved them into their grandmother's crowded house. Overwhelmed at school, Tod finds himself lagging behind his classmates and becoming entangled in a destructive gang. After Tod compassionately buries a dead fox, a fox-spirit offers him the chance...

Author	Cynthia Harnett
ISBN	0140301534

Considering how important the wool trade was to the development of early-modern Britain, it is surprising how few novels deal with the business of wool. Those written for young readers are even scarcer. The Wool-Pack helps fill the gap.

This is historical fiction rather than history, written...

Author	Anthony Powell
ISBN	0006540503

“The Military Philosophers” is the third and final part of the Autumn sequence in the Dance to the Music of Time. It also covers the second world war up to the time of final victory. As usual, I looked into the first pages for a powerful, allegoric image to set the mood and to act as a catalyst for the...

Author	Gore Vidal
ISBN	0910457344

Vidal's first novel - written when he was 19 - takes place aboard an Army boat in the Aleutian Islands near Alaska, and is as turbulent a drama as the Arctic wind from which it takes its name.

Into the minds of a half dozen men aboard a ship making a three day voyage amongh the trecherous Aleutians,...

Author	Norman Douglas
ISBN	1406926981

South Wind depicts a group of eccentric and even scandalous characters wiling away their time in a sunny Mediterranean resort. The novel takes place on Nepenthe, Douglas's thinly veiled version of Capri, an island retreat for pleasure-seekers since Roman times. In classical mythology, “nepenthe”...

Author	Geraldine McCaughrean
ISBN	0192752030

Ailsa doesn't trust MCC Berkshire, the mysterious man helping out in her mother's antique shop. He tells wonderful stories about all the antiques, and his stories persuade the customers to buy the items he talks about, but everything he says is a pack of lies. Isn't it?

The story of Ailsa and...

Author	C.S. Forester
ISBN	1931313172

One vital convoy can break Mussolini’s stranglehold on Malta – but it is intercepted in the Mediterranean by enemy warships … Five light British cruisers are left to beat back the armed might of the Italian battle fleet and C.S. Forester – creator of Horatio Hornblower – takes us aboard HMS...

Author	Henry Treece
ISBN	0875991173

Harald and his father Sigurd were vikings. Their king died, so they planned to go 'a viking' (on a voyage) to seek riches and treasure. They joined a crew by the coast and helped prepare the ship - Nameless. Unfortunately, whilst pushing the boat into the sea, Sigurd slipped and his leg was brocken under...