Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

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Jean Webster

Everyman's Children's Classics has more than 50 titles in print. It offers the finest editions currently available of the world's greatest children's books in handsome, full cloth hardcover bindings. 
 
The library brings back into print major illustrators such as Ivan Bilibin, Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, Nicolas Bentley, Walter Crane, Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Ardizzone, W.Heath Robinson and Mervyn Peake.

The grandniece of Mark Twain is now remembered only for the last two books she wrote, DADDY-LONG-LEGS (1912) and its sequal DEAR ENEMY (1915). Both remain endearing stories that, as the critic Naomi Lewis says ' make rewarding reading'. Told in the form of letters, this modern version of the Cinderalla tale is an irresistible love-story of an orphan and her unknown benefactor.

Daddy-Long-Legs

C S Evans

This most romantic of fairy tales is found in many versions, and the story of the beautiful girl who falls into a long sleep, to be awakened by a lover, has been interpreted by some as an allegory of the spring revival of the earth after a long winter. Charles Seddon Evans, a schoolmaster turned publisher, retold the story specially for Arthur Rackham, who illustrated it with silhouette drawing as a companion volume to CINDERELLA, both first published in 1919 and now reissued in Everyman's Library.

The Sleeping Beauty

Margery Clark

Auntie Katusha has just come from the Old Country, bringing poppy seeds to make cakes for a mischievous four-year-old boy named Andrewshek. A little neighbour, Erminka, who wears red boots which are too big for her, joins Andrewshek for a series of adventures with talking animals, including a greedy goose who steals the cakes; a naughty white goat who hides on the roof; and a kitten, a dog and two chickens who are determined to gatecrash the children’s tea party. There is art on every page, featuring cheeky animals, gooseberry tarts, colourful shawls and Russian dolls, and cheerful Auntie Katusha in her kerchiefed and aproned splendour.

The Poppy Seed Cakes

Rosemary Sutcliff

C. Walter Hodges

The Everyman edition reprints the classic black and white illustrations of C. Walter Hodges which accompanied the first edition in 1954. 
 
Around the year 117 AD, the Ninth Legion, stationed at Eburacum - modern day York - marched north to suppress a rebellion of the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again. During the 1860s, a wingless Roman Eagle was discovered during excavations at the village of Silchester in Hampshire, puzzling archaeologists and scholars alike. Rosemary Sutcliff weaves a compelling story from these two mysteries, dispatching her hero, the young Roman officer Marcus Aquila, on a perilous journey beyond Hadrian's Wall to find out what happened to the discredited legion in which his father served, and to salvage, if he can, its Eagle and its honour. 
 
All the essential elements of a classic adventure are here - the daring quest, the uncovering of the secrets of the past, and a nerve-racking escape across the mountains, pursued by vengeful tribesmen. But it is the human element which triumphs, and one of the most memorable scenes in the book is Marcus appealing to a crowd baying for blood to save a young British gladiator from certain death during the Saturnalia Games. Proud son of a Brigantian chieftain, Esca becomes his slave, then his freedman, and the indispensable companion of his travels. The Eagle of the Ninth is partly the story of their growing friendship, crossing the divide created by conquest and colonialism; and partly Marcus's journey of self-discovery as he learns of his father's fate and comes to terms with the end of his own military career. At the end he embraces a different, more hopeful future - not in Rome but 'under the pale and changeful northern skies' - acquiring a farm in the Downs, and marrying the girl next door. 
 
The Eagle of the Ninth has all its author's hallmark qualities - a mature and complex story, a wealth of historical detail, cultural sensitivity, wit and compassion. Above all, Sutcliff is able to conjure up the atmosphere of a distant age in a totally convincing way. It is hardly surprising that her work would set the standard for all historical fiction to come.

The Eagle of the Ninth

Kenneth Grahame

This classic of the English countryside, . first published in 1908, is a favourite with readers of all ages. As the late Margery Fisher wrote, 'Adults are sadly aware of the figure of Grahame himself, languishing in a city office and longing for the river: children respond to the fun, the anarchy of Toad and the entrancing detail as Grahame's son Alastair must have done when he listened to the bedside stories that became a book. ' The author invited Arthur Rackham to illustrate his book, but Rackham said he was too busy - a decision he was happily able to reconsider in 1936 when he was approached by the American publisher of the Limited Editions Club. The project, which he carried out with love and great care for the authenticity of detail, was his last: the drawings appeared first in the USA in 1939 and in Britian in 1950.

The Wind In The Willows

Louisa May Alcott

Written in six weeks, and at first thought by its editor to be 'dull', this story of an American family - four sisters and their mother living through the months while father is away in the Civil War - has a universal and enduring appeal. The reason is clear. Louisa Alcott based her story on her own experience of family life. 'Not a bit sensational', she wrote, 'but simple and true, for we really lived most of it. ' When published in 1868, the book was illustrated by May Alcott, Louisa's mother. GOOD WIVES, a sequel to LITTLE WOMEN, was published in 1869, taking up the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy three years on. In 1912 an English artist, Millicent Etheldreda Gray, with a reputation for closely-worked studies of domestic settings, was commissioned by Hodder and Stoughton to paint twelve watercolours for this most long-lasting of all family stories. A new feature film of LITTLE WOMEN written and directed by Greta Gerwig was released in December 2019, starring Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Florence Pugh as Amy, Emma Watson as Meg and Eliza Scanlen as Beth.

Little Women And Good Wives

Johanna Spyri

William Sharp

When Heidi, a five-year-old orphan, is dumped on her reclusive grandfather who lives on a remote mountainside above a Swiss village, he is none too pleased by her arrival. But Heidi quickly wins him over with her cheerful disposition and kindness, and thoroughly enjoys her new life, spending the summer days roaming the Alpine pastures with young Peter the goatherd. Three years later, this rural idyll is cruelly interrupted when her aunt fetches Heidi away to the city as a hired companion for Clara, a rich girl who is disabled. Clara adores her new friend, but the family's strict housekeeper tries to repress Heidi's high spirits and she becomes ill, pining for her mountain home. The resolution of Heidi's dilemma transforms the lives of everyone around her and has entranced readers for generations with its vision of the joys of country life and the power of love and friendship.

Heidi

Miguel De Cervantes

The story of the Spanish knight Don Quizote whose devotion to the tales of chivalry leads him into a series of bizarre adventures in the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, blends fantasy, comedy and gripping narrative in a way that has appealed to children ever since it was first published. All the wisdom and humour of Cervantes' great seventeenth-century classic are to be found in Parry's very readable modern abridgement, enhanced by the delightful illustrations of Walter Crane, one of the greatest of all English children's book illustrators.

Don Quixote Of The Mancha

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The first major retelling of the Greek myths and legends, A WONDER-BOOK was published in 1852. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was a friend of the poet Longfellow and had much earlier suggested they collaborate on a story for children based on the legend of Pandora's Box, but this never materialized. Hawthorne went ahead on his own, adding five other myths which he adapted very freely in a romantic and readable style, used deliberately to remove the classical tales from what he called 'cold moonshine. ' Hawthorne's book was criticized by adults for his bowdlerization, but it has always been popular with children and has attracted many illustrators, none more distinguished than Arthur Rackham who made his pictorial contribution in 1922.

A Wonder-Book For Boys And Girls

Just two years after the extraordinarily successful publication of LITTLE WOMEN and GOOD WIVES, Louisa Alcott's brother-in-law died, leaving two sons. She immediately decided to write a sequel to provide for her sister and nephews, and LITTLE MEN, published in 1871, became a tribute to her father's theories of education. The story is set in Plumfield, a school run by Jo and her German husband, Professor Bhaer, and they follow the precepts of Grandpa March in cultivating the little mind - 'not tasking it with long hard lessons, parrot-learned, but helping it to unfold as naturally and beautifully as sun and dew help roses bloom'. The different ways in which the children, good and bad, respond to this kind of nurturing make up the episodes of the novel which instantly proved as popular as its predecessors, selling 42, 000 in the first year after its publication.

Little Men

Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys

Johann Wyss

This classic story of a Swiss family - pastor, wife and four sons -shipwreaked on an uninhabited island (most fortunately blessed with an unlikely profusion of natural resources) was written by a Swiss army chaplain for the entertainment of his own four sons. The family adventures in survival; also provided a useful starting point for lessons in natural history. First published in Zurich in 1812-13, the story was translated into French and English shortly afterwards and has appeared in many versions ever since. When, in 1909, the American artist Louis John Rhead was invited to illustrate the Robinson's adventures, he based his numerous drawings on 'sketches made in the tropics. '

The Swiss Family Robinson

L. M. Montgomery

The appeal of this Canadian classic children's book is seemingly everlasting - for it is a story of an individual making good by her own efforts, an orphaned girl sent to live with an elderly brother and sister who really want a boy to help on the farm. First published in 1908, the book was written by a scoolteacher who'd experienced the same upbringing as her heroine and who set her story in the place she knew best - Prince Edward Island. The story was popular from the start, and Mark Twain described Anne as 'the dearest, and most lovable child in fiction since the ommortal Alice'. The book has been filmed, staged, tramslated in many languages, and has been introduced by a highly successful TV dramatization. Sybil Tawse, English portrait painter and illustrator of many classics, including Mrs Gaskell's CRANFORD and Lamb's ESSAYS OF ELIA, provided the pen-and-ink drawings in 1933.

Anne Of Green Gables

E Nesbit

Although E. Nesbit regarded her poetry as her most important work, it is her children's books (written 'to keep the house going') that ensured her lasting fame and which are still enjoyed with such affection today. Her readers have their oen favourites, but the film version of THE RAILWAY CHILDREN, with Jenny Agutter as Roberta, the eldest daughter of the man unjustly sent to prison, and the Bernard Cribbins as the friendly railway porter, brought the book to a new generation of readers who love it for Roberta's courage and the satisfaction of the ending when her father is vindicated and restored to his family. The film is regularly shown on British Television.

The Railway Children

Daniel Defoe

Defoe's most celebrated story of Crusoe's shipwreck, his resourcefulness and ingenuity in his soliatry life on a desert island and his rescue of Man Friday has been abridged and retold many times since its publication (in two volumes) in 1719. It even appeared recently in graphic-novel form. In 1968 Kathleen Lines determined to make the original text more accessible to young readers by breaking Defoe's original, continuous narrative into chapters, slightly cutting Crusoe's long meditations, and compressing the relevant bits of THE FARTHER ADVENTURES into a neat Epilogue, so that readers learn what happened to Friday. The evocative engravings are reproduced from a mid-nineteenth-century edition published by Cassell, Petter &amp; Gilpin.

Robinson Crusoe

His Life and Strange Surprising Adventures

Frances Hodgson Burnett

This story of two spoilt and lonely children, whose happiness is regained as they bring to life a neglected garden, has become the best-loved of all Mrs. Burnett's books, but it did not acquire universal popularity until long after its first publication in 1911 Although set in Yorkshire, it was inspired by the rose garden at Great Maytham Hall in Kent (which still flourishes) where its much-travelled author lived from 1898 to 1907. The story has many illustrators, bur none has surpassed Charles Robinson who first created in his pictures the romantic and mysterious atmosphere of Misselthwaite Manor and the locked, forgotten garden.

The Secret Garden

Richard Doyle

The story of Jack, the intrepid little boy whose courage and ingenuity defeated a host of many-headed giants several times his size, is an English folk-tale that must have been told often in the Victorian nursery of the Doyle family. Growing up in the 1830s, they were all gifted children, especially Richard, whose natural talent for draughtsmanship was matched by imaginative invention and a passion for legend and the grotesque. In 1842, when only eighteen, he created for his own delight a picture-book version of Jack The Giant Killer, writing the text by hand, and carefully placing on each page a water-colour illustration within a pictorial border. The new everyman edition has typeset the text for greater legibility and redesigned the book for contemporary appeal, while retaining Doyle's vivid and characterful illustrations, enlarged and enhanced by modern colour printing techniques. The result is a book that will satisfy the modern child's appetite for bloodthirsty exploits of wonder and magic, yet is at the same time a true collector's item for anyone interested in the history of children's book illustration.

Jack The Giant Killer

Robert Louis Stevenson

First published as a serial in YOUNG FOLKS between May and July 1886 and now reprinted in an Everyman edition on the centenary of Stevenson's death. KIDNAPPED is an adventure story that has become the model for any thriller of escape and suspense. Set in 1751, the flight of David Balfour and Alan Breck across the Highlands of Scotland is based on real events. Through he wrote the book to make money, while living as an invalid in Bournemouth. Stevenson was proud of it; he inscribed a presentation copy with the couplet. Here is the one sound page of all my writing. The one I'm proud of and that I delight in. Rowland Hilder is famous for his paintings of the English countryside but his work in book illustration covered a much wider canvas. His drawing for KIDNAPPED were first published in 1930 and have undesevedly, been long out of print.

Kidnapped

W Heath Robinson

From the Eastern folk tales that make up the vast collection known as THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS certain stories - of Aladdin, Sindbad and Ali Baba - have become everlasting favourites with children and a magical ingredient of Christmas pantomine. First introduced to Europe in the early eighteenth century by the French orientalist, Antione Galland, who translated and bowdlerized the stories to suit contemporary taste, this edition presents the fourteen best-known tales selected from an English text of 1821. The illustrations are reproduced from a larger collection in 1899. William Heath Robinson then at the start of his career, was commissioned with four others and his drawings (much the best) reveal a gentle, romantic charm that has been forgotten in the success of his later, purely comic work.

Aladdin

and Other Tales From The Arabian Nights

Felix Salten

Kurt Wiese

Bambi, a Life in the Woods is a 1923 Austrian coming-of-age novel written by Felix Salten - now published as a beautiful hardback edition in the Everyman's Library Children's Classics series. 
 
The novel traces the life of Bambi, a male roe deer, from his birth through childhood, the loss of his mother, the finding of a mate, the lessons he learns from his father, and the experience he gains about the dangers posed by human hunters in the forest. It is also, in its most complete translation, seen as a parable of the dangers and persecution faced by Jews in Europe.

Bambi

A Life In The Woods

Baroness Orczy

The exotically named Baroness Orczy was the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat who came to London at the age of fifteen. first published in 1905, her historical novel The Scarlet Pimpernel became almost as famous as the French Revolution itself. It tells of the escapades of Sir Percy Blakeney, whose mission is to help the innocent victims of the Reign of Terror escape the guillotine. Assuming ever more daring and ingenious disguises he suceeds in both outwitting his opponents and in keeping his activities a secret from his English friends. Everyman's Library Children's Classics publishes the novel in a new and up-to-date edition to tie in with the BBC production to be screened this Christmas.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Philip Pullman

Peter Bailey

A must-have for every child's library: two enchanting tales by the best-selling author of Northern Lights, in a special hardcover omnibus edition with newly colourised illustrations. 
 
With a delightful and unique introduction from the author- especially for this beautiful Everyman's Library volume. 
In The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, young Lila has learned from her father almost all there is to know about his profession—but he insists upon holding back the final secret. With the help of her friend Chulak, Lila discovers that anyone who wants to be a true firework-maker must face down the Fire-Fiend of Mount Merapi. It is only after Lila has set off on her quest that Chulak discovers the other half of the secret—and without it, Lila will perish. In the company of Hamlet, a talking white elephant, Chulak sets off to find Lila before it's too late. 
 
Clockwork features an apprentice clockmaker who is tempted to sell his soul. As the townspeople of Glockenheim gather on the eve of the annual unveiling of a new figure for the town clock, Karl, the apprentice, confides to Fritz, a storyteller, that he has failed his task to create one. Fritz, in his turn, has no idea how to finish the new story he has begun concocting, which he calls “Clockwork.” He begins to tell it anyway, only to see its dangerous antagonist materialize in front of the two boys and offer Karl a Faustian pact. 
Real life and storytelling merge, and destruction must be narrowly averted, in this unusual and suspenseful tale of the power of creativity.

The Firework-Maker's Daughter, Clockwork, or All Wound Up

Originally published as a serial in the children's monthly magazine ST NICHOLAS, LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY was Frances Hodgson Burnett's first children's novel and on its publication in book form in October 1866 it became at once an astonishing success. Reprinted before publication (even though its first printing was 10, 000 copies), the book went on the bestseller lists alongside Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE and Rider Haggards's KING SOLOMON'S MINES. Marghanita Laski described the novel as 'the best vesion on the Cinderella story in modern idiom that exists', and this tale of an arrogant English aristocrat reformed by his grandson, brought up in the classless society of New York, has retained its popularity over the years. Charles Brock, the PUNCH artist who epitomized the stereotype of the reserved, shy Englishman, illustrated the book with eight watercolours and forty-five pen-and-ink sketches for an edition first published by Warne in 1925.

Little Lord Fauntleroy

Kate Greenaway

This charming volume brings back into print some of the finest illustrated children's books from the Arts and Crafts Movement: Kate Greenaway's much-loved alphabet book, A Apple Pie, along with a selection of her illustrated nursery rhymes. 
 
Greenaway's drawings conjure up a never-never land of rural simplicity and innocence–an escape from the squalor of Victorian cities–that is as delightful now as it was when these gems of children's literature first appeared in the 1880s.

An Apple Alphabet And Traditional Nursery Rhymes

Hans Christian Andersen

When Kay gets a splinter of the wicked troll's magic mirror in his heart it becomes hard and cold - just like a lump of ice. Kay is abducted and bewitched by the chillingly beautiful Snow Queen and his loyal sister, Gerda is prepared to face anything to find her brother and bring him home. So, she undertakes the nightmarish journey to the Snow Queen's icy labyrinth. . . .

The Snow Queen

Anna Sewell

Described on the title-page of the first edition as 'the autobiography of her horse, translated from the original equine', BLACK BEAUTY was Anna Sewell's only book, written when she fatally ill but determined to record her passopnate indignation at the insensitive behaviour of people towards animals. It has been loved by children ever since its first publication in 1877, just a few months before the death of its author, whose declared aim had been to 'induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses'. The illustrations by Lucy Kemp-Welch first apperared in 1915.

Black Beauty

Edgar Allan Poe

Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) was one of the leading illustrators from the golden age of British book illustration. Fairy-tale and fantasy were his forte and in later life he responded to the dark stimulus of Poe's gothic tales with gleeful appreciation of their macabre and otherworldly qualities, claiming afterwards that he had quite succeeded in frightening himself! For lovers of the thrilling and chilling, young and old, Poe's sensational stories cannot fail to hit the spot. This collection contains the best of his prose works, including of course the well-known masterpieces 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (the ultimate haunted house story), 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (the very first detective story in fiction). First published in 1935 it has been redesigned, re-typeset and republished in a handsome edition which features all Rackham's original colour and black and white illustrations. A perfect gift  - though not for the faint-hearted!

Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Jean de La Fontaine

R. de la Nézière

Seventeenth-century Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine happily plundered Aesop and other classical writers as a source for his witty, elegant fables, as well as inventing a number of his own. Seeking to expose the weaknesses of human nature, he offered vivid perspectives on greed and flattery, envy and avarice, love and friendship, old age and death. The sixty fables collected here – from 'The Crow and the Fox' and 'The Cock and the Pearl' to 'The Grasshopper and the Ant' and 'The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse' – are illustrated with more than a hundred drawings by R. de La Nezière which which charmingly capture La Fontaine’s unforgettable cast of animal personalities.

Fables

Alexandre Dumas

Dumas' most popular novel, The Three Musketeers, has long been a favourite with children, and its heroes are well-known from many a film and TV adaption. Set in France in the seventeenth century, it follows the fortunes of D'Artagnan, a poor Gascon gentleman, who arrives in Paris to join the Kings Musketeers and is befriended by three of them, Athos, Portos and Aramis, with whom he embarks upon a career of adventure and romance. Dumas is a brilliant story-teller: inexhaustively inventive, a master of dialogue and with a fine sense of drama and of historical period, he seizes the readers attention on the first page and holds it to the last. Everyman's Library Children's Classics reprints the first, and the best, English translation, by William Barrow.

The Three Musketeers

Carlo Collodi

Everyone knows Pinocchio, the walking, talking wooden puppet carved from a table leg. Pinocchio, an endearing scamp, is always getting himself into trouble. But it isn't the sort of trouble most kids get into. Skiving off school, he is kidnapped by a puppeteer, robbed by a Cat and Fox, and persuaded to visit an earthly paradise where naughty children have perpetual fun - and turn into donkeys. Sold to a circus, then to a man who tries to drown him for his donkey-skin, he miraculously turns back into a puppet and goes in search of his 'father' (whom he must rescue from the belly of a giant dogfish ...). 
 
Throughout these manic adventures he is haunted by the ghost of a Talking Cricket he has crushed to death for giving good advice, and watched over by his personal guardian fairy. All the while, Pinocchio dreams of becoming a real boy. Told with wit and humour, his story is also a moral fable about making the right choices, and what it is to be a loving human being. 
 
Pinocchio is an astonishing work of fantasy which has been toned down and sentimentalized over the years, not least by the Walt Disney film. Everyman returns to a beautifully illustrated early translation of 1916 which captures the vivid inventiveness of Collodi's original.

Pinocchio

Jacob Grimm

Wilhelm Grimm

No children's library is complete without this beautiful Everyman's Library hardcover edition of the Brothers Grimm's original fairy tales. 
Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Thumb, and Snow White (Snowdrop) are among the jewels we owe to the German Brothers Grimm, who began in the first decade of the 19th century to seek out and listen to village storytellers. The best-loved of the tales they discovered have inspired generations and are now brought together with the marvellous pictures that in 1900 first established the reputation of one of the greatest children's illustrators of all time, Arthur Rackham. 
 
 
Beautiful illustrations in monochrome by Arthur Rackham make this collection of famous fairy stories a wonderful and timeless gift for children's and adults alike.

Grimms' Fairy Tales

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