The Eddie Dickens Trilogy

AWFUL END When both of Eddie Dickens's parents catch a disease that makes them turn yellow, go a bit crinkly round the edges and smell of hot water bottles, it's agreed he should go and stay with relatives at their house Awful End. Unfortunately for Eddie, those relatives are Mad Uncle Jack and Even-Madder Aunt Maud, and it doesn't look as if the three of them are ever going to reach their destination ... DREADFUL ACTS Eddie Dickens narrowly avoids an explosion, a hot-air balloon and arrest, only to find himself falling head-over heels for a girl with a face like a camel's, and into the hands of a murderous gang of escaped convicts who have 'one little job for him to do'. TERRIBLE TIMES Eddie had been given the task of travelling to America to look after his family's interests there. But his life is never that simple; especially with a potential stowaway in his trunk, and Lady Constance Bustle at his side. She's a professional 'travelling companion', whose previous employers seem to have died under the most remarkable and unfortunate circumstances ...

When both Eddie Dickens' parents catch a disease that makes them turn yellow, it's agreed he should go and stay with relatives at their house, Awful End. This hilarious historical spoof, the first in the Eddie Dickens trilogy, has been called "a scrumptious cross between Dickens and Monty Python." Illustrations.

In the final book, Eddie is on board a ship heading for America, but a stowaway and familiar faces from Eddie's past complicate matters, as does being set adrift in a leaky rowboat. Illustrations.

As his awfully exciting adventures continue, young Eddie Dickens finds himself grappling with a hot-air balloon and falling head-over-heels for a girl with a face like a camel's.

Eddie Dickens finds himself far from home in the heathery highlands of Scotland for some Further Adventures embracing a whole host of new characters and firm favourites such as Malcolm the stuffed stoat. Including Dubious Deeds, Horrendous Habits and The Final Curtain, fans of Philip Ardagh will gobble up this great gift edition.

In this, the third and final of The Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens, our saucer-eyed hero Eddie Dickens finds himself embroiled in an attempt to foil a plot to steal an oil painting of Mad Uncle Jack, mistakenly commissioned by the War Office (who thought he was the other Major Dickens). Add to this the explosive mix of Even Madder Aunt Maud and Annabelle, the baby pet crocodile she now leads around on a silver chain; Dr Samuel Moot, besotted by Maud since a young man, having once shot Mad Uncle Jack (twice) in a duel; Gherkin a professional dwarf; Eddie's Uncle Alfie and surfeit of heather; and all the usual suspects (including Malcolm, of course) . . . and you're in for another slice of the ridiculous served up in the way that only Ardagh can.

The classic novel from "America's best crime novelist" (Time), with a new introduction by Dennis Lehane George V. Higgins's seminal crime novel is a down-and-dirty tale of thieves, mobsters, and cops on the mean streets of Boston. When small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is convicted on a felony, he's looking at three years in the pen--that is, unless he sells out one of his big-fish clients to the DA. But which of the many hoods, gunmen, and executioners whom he calls his friends should he send up the river? Told almost entirely in crackling dialogue by a vivid cast of lowlifes and detectives, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the greatest crime novels ever written. “The best crime novel ever written--makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew.” -- Elmore Leonard

In their second adventure, the four remaining McNally children are drawn to the mysterious Fishbone Forest in search of their dead brother's stolen brain, only to discover the terrifying Mr. Maggs and his sinister plan to change the world.

First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. “Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (The New York Times Book Review). Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away. Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” that retraces much of the twentieth century’s torrid and momentous history. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE “Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and—a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture—adult.” —The Washington Post “Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting.” —The Seattle Times “A masterpiece of storytelling.” —The Dallas Morning News

Enables children to understand how animals and plants live in the natural world through a series of questions and answers. Suggested level: primary, intermediate.