The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy is back in an exciting, very funny 7th adventure. In The Worst Witch & the Wishing Star, Mildred, notoriously the worst witch at Miss Cackle`s Academy for Witches, makes a wish on a shooting star
- & to her great surprise it comes true! But it also spells trouble. Mildred`s wish-come-true is a small dog but she has to keep him a secret from her friends, & especially the formidable Miss Hardbroom. It`s a disaster waiting to happen.. .and it does...! The Worst Witch & the Wishing Star launches a stunning new cover look & an appealing squarer format across the whole of the Worst Witch series which

Includes:: The Worst Witch; The Worst Witch Strikes Again; A Bad Spell for the Worst Witch; The Worst Witch all at Sea; The Worst Witch Saves the Day & The Worst Witch to the Rescue. Jill Murphy was born in London in 1949. From a very early age she was drawing & writing stories, & was already putting books together (literally, with a stapler) by the time she was six. She went on to study at Chelsea, Croydon & Camberwell Schools of Art. Jill worked in a children`s home for four years & as a nanny for a year, before becoming a freelance writer & illustrator. The Worst Witch stories, of which this is the seventh, are some of Puffin`s most successful titles.


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This is a captivating mystery of the best kind
- the sort that really happened. While walking through a cliff-top graveyard in
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In February 1805, the Earl of Abergavenny set sail in convoy from Portsmouth for a voyage to India & China, captained by John Wordsworth, the younger brother of the poet William Wordsworth. On board were more than 400 passengers & crew. Only three days later, separated from the convoy by stormy weather, the ship struck the notorious Shamble shoal in Weymouth bay & sank, drowning 260 souls including her Captain. From the harrowing accounts of the survivors & the detailed official & press reports if the disaster, The Wreck of the Abergavenny brilliant recreates this tragic event & its impact on John's brother William & his friends Coleridge, Charles & Mary Lamb, & many others. Dramatic, haunting & engaging, The Wreck of the Abergavenny is an intimate & beautifully observed view of a family & the effects of tragedy. It is a masterpiece of narrative non-fiction. ' Hayter gives us intellectual as well as emotional excitement...beautifully crafted & a pleasure to read.'
- Sunday Times. ' Hayter's marvellous book is.a jewel of popular history writing.'
- Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review.

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The battered hulk of a huge ship looms out of the stinging spray of a furious gale. Only one man, half-mad, remains aboard, working without sleep or sustenance to save her from sinking. But this man is no hero, & this ship was not meant to be saved. As Hammond Innes` classic tale moves from desperate struggles on the sea to a nail-biting courtroom controversy, the murky truth about the last voyage of the Mary Deare finally comes to light. ...

A gripping children`s story from War Horse author & former Children`s Laureate Michael Morpurgo.” We all knew what was going to happen. We`d seen it before. A ship about to founder staggers before she falls. A huge wave broke over her stern & she did not come upright again.” Life on the Scilly Isles in 1907 is bleak & full of hardship. Laura`s twin brother, Billy, disappears, & then a storm devastates everything. It seems there`s little hope. But then the Zanzibar is wrecked on the island`s rocks, & everything changes... The Wreck of the Zanzibar is a gripping historical adventure from the author of An Eagle in the Snow, Listen to the Moon, Shadow, & An Elephant in the Garden. Michael Morpurgo is the master storyteller of such modern classic children`s books as War Horse, Friend or Foe, Private Peaceful, & Kensuke`s Kingdom. He has written more than one hundred books for children & won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children`s Book Award & has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times. ...

From the bestselling author of The Robin: A Biography The wren is a paradox of a bird. On the one hand wrens are ubiquitous. They are Britain’s most common bird, with 8.5 million breeding pairs & have by far the loudest song in proportion to their size. They also thrive up & down Britain & Ireland: from the smallest city garden to remote offshore islands, blustery moors to chilly mountains. Yet many people, particularly a younger generation, are not sure if they have ever seen a wren. Perhaps because the wren is so tiny, weighing just as much as two A4 sheets of paper, & so busy, always on the move, more mouse than bird. However if we cast our eyes back to recent history wrens were a mainstay of literary, cultural & popular history. The wren was on postage stamps & the farthing, it featured in nursery rhymes & greetings cards, poems & rural ‘wren hunts’, still a recent memory in Ireland particularly. With beautiful illustrations throughout, this captivating year-in-the-life biography reveals the hidden secrets of this fascinating bird that lives right on our doorstep. ...

Frantz Fanon`s seminal work on the trauma of colonization, ” The Wretched of the Earth” made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. This ” Penguin Modern Classics” edition is translated from the French by Constance Farrington, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule & first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon`s classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture & violence in the struggle for freedom. With power & anger, Fanon makes clear the economic & psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war & mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, & who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism. Many of the great calls to arms from the era of decolonization are now of purely historical interest, yet this passionate analysis of the relations between the great powers & the ` Third World` is just as illuminating about the world we live in today. Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was a Martinique-born French author essayist, psychoanalyst, & revolutionary. Fanon was a supporter of the Algerian struggle for independence from French rule, & became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization & the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades. If you enjoyed ” The Wretched of the Earth”, you might like Edward Said`s ” Orientalism”, also available in ” Penguin Modern Classics”. ” In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism”. (” Independent”). ...

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men & how was it that they achieved what they did? David Mc Cullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly human story of Wilbur & Orville Wright. Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage & determination, & of far-ranging intellectual interests & ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. In this thrilling book, Mc Cullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, & more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers` story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them. ...

The Wright Floor Globe is an authentic reproduction from a drawing found in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation archives. It ...

From the grand tour to the global village, novelists & poets have made particularly observant travellers. Many writers have been prone to wanderlust, eager to explore the world & draw inspiration from their travels. They recorded their notes in letters, journals, essays & books. In some cases, these became celebrated examples of travel writing, but there are many more accounts which remain overlooked. In The Writer Abroad, Lucinda Hawksley takes us on a literary journey around the world, through extracts from Arthur Conan Doyle in Australia, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, Charles Dickens in Italy, Henry James in France, Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden, & many more. ...