My Christmas Wish by Monica Richardson (1 Review)    Price verified 9 hours ago

This story is about a little girl's wish at Christmas. This book talks about a heavy snowy winter in Pennsylvania in around 1960. How was Santa going to get to her house and how would the tree be purchased and decorated by Christmas Eve? It is a sweet memory of the author as she remembers her childhood in the 1960s and later reads it to her six grandchildren, ages ranging from 21-4 in the present day. This story is easy to read and follow.

Genre: Classics

Charley Is My Darling : An evacuee coming of age tale by Joyce Cary (Lume Books) (20 Reviews)    Price verified one hour ago

A charming, accessible tale of childhood and youth, that offers plentiful insight and raises many questions. Charley is a London lad and an evacuee. Initially an outcast, his wit and humour win him friends, although not always of the best type. Among Charley Brown's first deeds as an evacuee to Longwater in the West Country is to let loose the local bull. Boys who one minute had taunted him with the refrain 'Ballocky baldy' (Charley's lice having been evacuated from London with him), were the next minute acknowledging him as their natural leader. Charley Brown, one of Joyce Cary's most uproarious and memorable creations, is a love and a terror. He is a quivering jelly in the hands of girls and women of any age who show him kindness; through the wild force of his imagination he holds children rapt with tales of desperate gunmen with exquisite manners and a taste for the beautiful. He leads his gang into daring acts both grand and bad. As Charley's sweetheart Lizzy Galor rightly puts it, he's every bit as good as the movies... But those movies don't always have a happy ending. Charley is My Darling will please those who already enjoy the work of Cary. Readers with an interest in social history, education and child development will also enjoy it. Praise for Charley is my Darling and Joyce Cary: 'To find a novelist who saw more deeply and conveyed more truly you have to go back to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Balzac and Goethe, Mann and Hesse' - Bernard Levin 'One of the best of our novelists, certainly one of the most original, in the great early tradition of Defoe and Fielding' - Elizabeth Bowen 'Whenever I am idle I choose a Cary novel in the way I might seek a friend's company, and it is not long before I am encouraged, inspired to write' - Paul Theroux Joyce Cary was born in 1888 into an old Anglo-Irish family and educated at Clifton. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris, before going up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1909 to read law. On coming down he ...

Genre: Classics