When Francisco Pizarro disembarked in Peru in 1532 he found a vast empire seemingly overflowing with gold & silver. Ruled by monarchs claiming direct descent from the sun itself, its inhabitants built roads, bridge & terraced fields in the precipitous Andes, & made brilliant textiles & dazzling jewelry
- all without possessing either writing or the wheel. Within a few short months this empire had been conquered & its subjects killed or enslaved.
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” Paris, 1959. As dusk settles over the immigrant quarter, 12-year-old Michel Marini
- amateur photographer & compulsive reader
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” Maybe the earth will continue to spin, & the stars won`t implode for a bazillion more years, but I know, with a certainty my stupid brain has done its best to ignore, that this moment
- right here, with the people I love most
- is not going to last.” Alba is facing one of the most important summers of her life. School is over & while her friends want to escape their sleepy hometown, she just wants to stay put. But when a viral video about the end of the world announces that Eden Valley is the only safe place to be, thousands of people descend on the town. Amidst parties & prayer circles, Alba feels like her world has turned upside down. At least she`s got Cinnamon Girl
- the comic-strip alter ego she`s created...A funny & unique feel-good read about how to keep on being yourself when everything around you is changing, perfect for fans of Rainbow Rowell, Non Pratt & John Green.


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` Once you started anything in Professor Branestawm`s house you never knew when it might finish or even if it ever would` Poor Mrs Flittersnoop! It`s not easy being Professor Branestawm`s housekeeper. People may say he`s a genius, but all his inventions always make life more complicated, alarming & extraordinary than it was before. An innocent bottle of old cough mixture turns out to be an elixir that makes all the waste paper in the bin come to life, the burglar-catcher & the pancake-maker operate just a little too efficiently, & about the spring-cleaning machine, the less said the better. You could write a book about it, but nobody would believe it.

Includes:: exclusive

Material: In the Backstory you can find out about accidental inventions that changed our lives & try a few experiments of your own! Vintage Children`s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds & the adults in their lives. Discover timeless favourites from The Jungle Book & Alice`s Adventures in Wonderland to modern classics such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas & The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.



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The mouth-watering new book from acclaimed author illustrator, Oliver Jeffers. Henry loves books...but not like you & I. He loves to EAT books! This exciting story follows the trials & tribulations of a boy with a voracious appetite for books. Henry discovers his unusual taste by mistake one day, & is soon swept up in his new-found passion
- gorging on every delicious book in sight! & better still, he realises that the more books he eats, the smarter he gets. Henry dreams of becoming the Incredible Book Eating Boy; the smartest boy in the world! But a book-eating diet isn`t the healthiest of habits, as Henry soon finds out...
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Prince`s College, Cambridge, is a peaceful & scholarly community, enlivened by Prudence Pinsent, the Master`s daughter. Spirited, beautiful, & thoroughly unconventional, Prudence is a remarkable young woman. One fine morning she sets out for Suffolk to join her cousin Lord Wellende for a few days` hunting. On the way Prudence encounters Captain Studde of the coastguard
- who is pursuing a quarry of his own. Studde is on the trail of a drug smuggling ring that connects Wellende Hall with the cloistered world of Cambridge. It falls to Prudence to unravel the identity of the smugglers
- who may be forced to kill, to protect their secret.

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Holly is off on her first international Dadventure! Dad`s taking Holly on one of his travel-writing trips
- to Malaysia! Holly
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The third volume of stories featuring the cunning clerical sleuth Father Brown. Ahead of a new series of the popular BBC adaptation starring Mark Williams, all five of Chesterton`s original Father Brown books have been republished with charming & collectible Penguin covers. ` That sort of thing may be very well for crypts & cloisters & all sorts of moonshiny places. But ghosts can`t get through a closed door in an American hotel.` Father Brown, the shrewd & modest clerical detective, encounters miracles, ghosts & prophets in this third volume of ingeniously plotted tales. From South America to New York, his keen observation & quiet wisdom are a match for any mystery
- even when he finds himself missing, presumed dead, in his own coffin.. .G. K. Chesterton was born in 1874. He attended the Slade School of Art, where he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown, before turning his hand to journalism. A prolific writer throughout his life, his best- known books include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) & the Father Brown stories. Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922 & died in 1938.` Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story` Jorge Luis Borges
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January, 1913, Cambridge. G.H. Hardy
- eccentric, charismatic & considered the greatest British mathematician of his age
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In 1895/6 the sixty-year-old Mark Twain set off on a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts from a publishing company bankruptcy, notes from which a year later became his final travel book Following the Equator. Two years later he wrote, ` How I did loathe that journey around the world! except the sea-part & India.` Although he was only in India for just over two of the twelve months, his exploits & observations there take up forty per cent of the book-and by common consent are by far the best & liveliest part of it. In The Indian Equator the Mark Twain travel trilogist Ian Strathcarron, his wife & photographer Gillian & his factota Sita follow in his mentor`s footsteps, train tracks & boat wakes tracing the route that Twain, his wife Livy, his daughter Clara, his manager Smythe & his bearer Satan took as they crisscrossed the sub-continent. Leaving from the Bombay that was & the Mumbai that is, both writers follow the lecture circuit of old India--including what is now Pakistan--across the plains & cities of the north up to the peaks of the Himalayas by way of Baroda, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Benares/ Varanasi, Calcutta/ Kolkata, Darjeeling, Lahore & Rawalpindi. Staying in the same Raj clubs, travelling down the same train lines, meeting the high & mighty & the downtrodden & destitute, Twain & Strathcarron are absorbed by an India that then was & now is `not for the faint of heart nor mild of spirit nor weak of mind nor dull of sense nor correct of politic`; a rapidly changing yet still deeply traditional society where `a few hundred million have grabbed the twenty-first century by the whiskers & many more hundred million still tuck the nineteenth century into bed at night`. Mark Twain loved the India of 1896; like his trilogist, he would love it still. ...