Pauline Francis

Edmond Dantes is a common seaman falsely accused of spying during the Napoleonic Wars. Imprisoned without trial in the infamous Chateau d'If, he spends over a decade in solitary confinement. With the aid of a fellow captive, he makes a daring escape. Once outside, he fabricates a stately new identity as the Count of Monte Cristo and vows to bring the villains who framed him to justice. A classic swashbuckler based on the 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas.

The girls gave their hearts into their mother's keeping, their souls into their father's; and to both parents...they gave a love that grew with their growth, and bound them tenderly together by the sweetest tie which blesses life and outlives death.Pretty Meg, tomboy Jo, shy Beth, and vain Amy, the four March sisters, are as different as sisters can be, but more devoted and loyal sisters you'll never find. For though the March girls fight, tease, nag, and scold as all sisters do, they do so with the knowledge that nothing is as precious as a sister's love. Discover the magic of family in the first part of this classic novel cherished by young girls everywhere.

When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day.The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951, expresses many of the political concerns of its time: the Cold War, the fear of biological experimentation and the man-made apocalypse. However, with its terrifyingly believable insights into the genetic modification of plants, the book is more relevant today than ever before. [Comment by Liz Jensen on The Guardian]: > As a teenager, one of my favourite haunts was Oxford's Botanical Gardens. I'd head straight for the vast heated greenhouses, where I'd pity my adolescent plight, chain-smoke, and glory in the insane vegetation that burgeoned there. The more rampant, brutally spiked, poisonous, or cruel to insects a plant was, the more it appealed to me. I'd shove my butts into their root systems. They could take it. My librarian mother disapproved mightily of the fags but when under interrogation I confessed where I'd been hanging out – hardly Sodom and Gomorrah – she spotted a literary opportunity, and slid John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids my way. I read it in one sitting, fizzing with the excitement of recognition. I knew the triffids already: I'd spent long hours in the jungle with them, exchanging gases. Wyndham loved to address the question that triggers every invented world: the great "What if . . ." What if a carnivorous, travelling, communicating, poison-spitting oil-rich plant, harvested in Britain as biofuel, broke loose after a mysterious "comet-shower" blinded most of the population? That's the scenario faced by triffid-expert Bill Masen, who finds himself a sighted man in a sightless nation. Cataclysmic change established, cue a magnificent chain reaction of experimental science, physical and political crisis, moral dilemmas, new hierarchies, and hints of a new world order. Although the repercussions of an unprecedented crisis and Masen's personal journey through the new wilderness form the backbone of the story, it's the triffids that root themselves most firmly in the reader's memory. Wyndham described them botanically, but he left enough room for the reader's imagination to take over. The result being that everyone who reads The Day of the Triffids creates, in their mind's eye, their own version of fiction's most iconic plant. Mine germinated in an Oxford greenhouse, in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

A classic novel of the future follows the Time Traveller as he hurtles one million years into the future and encounters a world populated by two distinct races, the childlike Eloi and the disgusting Morlocks who prey on the Eloi.

A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator.

This anthology features the 12 winning stories and poems from the World Book Day Short Stories Primary Competition.

Plymouth, 1586. Ripped from her Native American family and shipped to England as an exhibit for Sir Walter Raleigh, Nadie is thrust into a British Tudor life. Her only protector is Tom, a young blacksmith who makes Nadie's heart burn with love. When Nadie is forced back to her exotic homeland, to help the English colonize her people, Tom stays by her side. But the New World holds untold dangers.

Born in the workhouse, Oliver Twist has known nothing but hunger and misery. He runs away to London to start a better life, but falls in with the wicked Fagin and his gang of thieves. Just when everything seems hopeless, events take an unexpected turn.

Dorothy and her little dog, Toto get swept away to a magical land and search for the way back to Kansas.

The governess of two enigmatic children fears their souls are in danger from the ghosts of the previous governess and her sinister lover.