In tracing the parish boy's progress, Dickens did not write a topical satire on the workhouse system and the role of the 1834 New Poor Law in fostering criminality, he created a story about the survival of good, and the exploitation of violence.

It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the...

After being swept overboard from an ocean liner, fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, spoiled son of a millionaire, is rescued by New England fishermen who put him to work on their boat.

In the third book in the number one bestselling Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz, teenage spy Alex faces his most dangerous challenge yet. Teaming up with the CIA, Alex must go to a remote Caribbean island called Skeleton Key, where the insane general Sarov is hatching explosive plans to re-write history.

Twelve-year-old David's grief over his mother's death at the start of World War II intensifies with his father's remarriage and the impending birth of a sibling, so when his books begin talking to him, tempting him to enter a portal into a magical world, he decides to take the risk.

Retired to the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year-old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion : an African gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out-a top secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank...

Detective Vincent Ruiz has no memory of how he ended up in the Thames with a bullet in his leg, or where the photo of a kidnapped seven-year- old girl came from that was found in his pocket. After a bloody boat is discovered nearby, it's clear that Ruiz was not the only casualty. Under investigation by his colleagues and accused of faking amnesia, Ruiz turns to Joe O'Loughlin, hoping the psychologist can help unlock his memory.

"The haunting new thriller from Alex North, author of the New York Times bestseller The Whisper Man You knew a teenager like Charlie Crabtree. A dark imagination, a sinister smile--always on the outside of the group. Some part of you suspected he might be capable of doing something awful. Twenty-five years ago, Crabtree did just that, committing a murder so shocking that it's attracted that strange kind of infamy that only exists on the darkest corners...

A retired teacher reminisces about his years at Brookfield School, the thousands of boys he had known, and his happy marriage.

Eleven-year-old miner's son Billy Elliot is on his way to boxing lessons when he stumbles upon a ballet class. Billy secretly joins the class, knowing that his blue-collar family would never understand.