Discover this beautiful pet-adoption story from Holly Hobbie, the creator of the bestselling Toot & Puddle series and one of the most treasured children’s illustrators of all time. Beloved author-illustrator Holly Hobbie presents the story of a rescue cat’s adoption, the paradise he finds, and the transformative joy he brings to his new family. Holly Hobbie’s intricate watercolors evoke the small kitten’s hardscrabble life as powerfully as they do his blissful one. This story tugs the heartstrings and is a testament to the importance of pet adoption and the powerful ways that pets connect with their people.
Most Americans believe that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. But British scientist Joseph Swan was working on this invention at the same time. Patent battles, lies, and determination fill out this race to create the first usable light bulb!
Alfie has always loved playing with Penguin, an enormous cat, who Alfie has claimed as his own. But when his next door neighbour's granddaughter, Grace, comes to live with her, she decides Penguin belongs to her! What neither of them realizes is that while they thought Penguin was with the other one, he has actually disappeared...
A new, irresistible character from the creator of Toot & Puddle is now available in a board book for the littlest readers! Elmore is a porcupine desperate to make friends. But it is hard to be close to others when you're covered with spikes that shoot off your back every so often. Elmore suffers rejection and heartbreak, but the goodness of his forest community ultimately shines through as the animals find a way to connect with this prickly bundle of love. Holly Hobbie is the creator of the beloved Toot & Puddle series and now brings us a character for the next generation. Just as charming, funny, and good-hearted as her little pigs, Elmore the porcupine will snuggle and prickle his way securely into the picture-book canon.
Seven superb short stories from the bestselling author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG! The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is coming soon to Netflix! Meet the boy who can talk to animals and the man who can see with his eyes closed. And find out about the treasure buried deep underground. A clever mix of fact and fiction, this collection also includes how master storyteller Roald Dahl became a writer. With Roald Dahl, you can never be sure where reality ends and fantasy begins. "All the tales are entrancing inventions." —Publishers Weekly
A literary master’s story about the aggravations and great joys of cats, from “a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humor and a hushed tenderness of detail” (Julian Barnes) In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in Kersko. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and his country retreat, where he wrote and tended to a community of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and more complex, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer. All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is a confessional memoir, the chronicle of an author who becomes overwhelmed. As he is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas created by his indulgent love for the animals, there are episodes of intense brutality as he controls the feline population. Yet in the end, All My Cats is a book about Hrabal’s relationship to nature, about the unlikely sources of redemption that come to him unbidden, like a gift from the cosmos—and about love.
A Company of Swans is a sweeping tale of romance, freedom and the beauty of dance from award-winning author, Eva Ibbotson, with a new introduction by Joanna Nadin. Weekly ballet classes are Harriet Morton's only escape from her intolerably dull life. So when she is chosen to join a corps de ballet which is setting off on a tour of the Amazon, she leaps at the chance to run away for good. Performing in the grand opera houses is everything Harriet dreamed of, and falling in love with an aristocratic exile makes her new life complete. Swept away by it all, she is unaware that her father and intended fiancé have begun to track her down . . . 'I have binged on Eva Ibbotson . . . her elegantly written, witty and well-observed fables' Nigella Lawson, The Times Rediscover Eva Ibbotson, award-winning author of Journey to the River Sea, in her sweeping historical romances, including The Morning Gift, A Song For Summer and The Secret Countess, originally published as A Countess Below Stairs, Magic Flutes, originally published as The Reluctant Heiress, Madensky Square and A Company of Swans.
The world is big. Anna is small. The snow is everywhere and all around. But one night . . . One night, her mother takes her to the ballet, and everything is changed. Anna finds a beauty inside herself that she cannot contain. So begins the journey of a girl who will one day grow up to be the most famous prima ballerina of all time, inspiring legions of dancers after her: the brave, the generous, the transcendently gifted Anna Pavlova. Beautiful, inspirational, and triumphant, Anna Pavlova's life is masterfully captured in this exquisite picture book.
A New York Times BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER A CrimeReads & Book and Film Globe BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A Tor.com BEST BOOK OF JUNE “Truly bewitching.” —David Mitchell It is no small matter, after all, to create something—to make it so only by setting down the words. We forget the magnitude, sometimes, of that miracle. In the dead of night, shots ring out over the grounds of a sprawling English estate. The world-weary butler Eustace recognizes the gunman—his longtime employer, Mr. Crowe—and knows he must think and act quickly. Who is the man lying dead on the lawn? Who is the woman in his company? Can he clean up his master’s mess like he always has before? Or will this bring a new kind of reckoning? Mr. Crowe was once famed for his gifts—unaccountable gifts, known only to the members of a secretive order. Protected and privileged, he was courted by countesses and great men of letters. But he has long since retreated from that glittering world, living alone but for Eustace and Clara, his mysterious young ward. He has been content to live quietly, his great library gathering dust and his once magnificent gardens growing wild. He has left the past behind. Until now. Because there are rules, even for Mr. Crowe and his kind, that cannot be broken. And this single night of passion and violence will have consequences, stirring shadows from the past and threatening those he now cares for. He and the faithful Eustace will be tested as never before. So too will Clara, whose own extraordinary gifts remain hidden, even from herself. If she is to save them all, she must learn to use them quickly and unlock the secret of who she is. It is a secret beyond imagining. A secret that will change everything.
