Eleven year-old Jess Aaron’s life is a hard one. The family farm can’t support them, so he and his four sisters and parents struggle to make ends meet on what his father can earn working in construction. They are a poor family in a community of poor families; money is tight and there [...]
Sent to spend the summer on the west coast with his Gran and four girls cousins while his mother honeymoons with her new husband, twelve year-old Kip finds himself rather overwhelmed by this first meeting with his extended family. Since her big, rambling house by the sea is due to be torn down at [...]
Thirteen-year-old Rosa has lived with her Uncle for almost as long as she can remember. Together, they travel from village to town, supported by Uncle’s begging and petty thievery, while he looks for the opportunity, the deal, the swindle, that will change his luck and land him on easy street.
Yet Rosa knows that her name [...]
Hussein is a young boy growing up in a small village in Bulgaria. He lives with his mother and father and his younger brother Hassan, and is surrounded by the familiar and loving embrace of his grandparents, and his aunts and uncles and cousins.
Hussein and his family are Roma, or Gypsies, and have been [...]
This is a collection of nine short stories. The young people who inhabit Wynne-Jones’ tales are independent thinkers, often wise beyond their years, who react to the ordinary and sometimes extraordinary events of their lives in ways that reflect their unique and complex personalities. Rich in the small observations that evoke the reader’s [...]
London, 1945. When their house is bombed, 10-year-old Peggy, along with her mum and baby brother Tommy, go to live with her granddad, a difficult old man whom Peggy doesn’t know very well, and who doesn’t seem happy to have them stay. Peggy must go to a new school, where she is ignored [...]
