When the kindly old aunts decide that they need help caring for creatures who live on their hidden island, they know that adults can't be trusted. What they need are a few special children who can keep a secret-a secret as big as a magical island. And what better way to get children who can keep really big secrets, than to kidnap them! (After all, some children just plain need to be kidnapped.) Don't miss this wildly inventive and funny read from master storyteller Eva Ibbotson.

An enchanting love story set in the Amazon, by the award-winning and bestselling author of JOURNEY TO THE RIVER SEA.

It is 1910 and Maia, tragically orphaned at thirteen, has been sent from England to start a new life with distant relatives in Manaus, hundreds of miles up the Amazon. She is accompanied by an eccentric and mysterious governess who has secret reasons of her own for making the journey. Both soon discover an exotic world bursting with new experiences in Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson’s highly colourful, joyous adventure.

A funny, fantastical collection of cautionary tales from the mind-bogglingly brilliant and bestselling Eva Ibbotson. Now with a brand-new look! Are you BRAVE enough to find out what happens when a spoilt girl is spiteful to a giant hungry worm? Can you BEAR to watch a (very silly) boy poke an angry sleeping sea-monster? Do you DARE to discover why should you never, ever steal milk from a Frid? Beware: Naughty children always get their just deserts . . . A dog-munching rock. Doesn’t everyone know that?

A spooky and hilarious adventure from the brilliant Eva Ibbotson, now with a fantastic new cover-look!

When their parents go to America for the summer, Madlyn and Rollo are sent to their great-aunt Emily and great-uncle George at Clawstone Castle, home of the legendary and mysterious Wild White Cattle of Clawstone Park. But times are hard at Clawstone, as the fancier castle down the road attracts all the tourist traffic. Determined to save the castle and the herd, Madlyn and Rollo audition a cast of ghosts to add some thrills to the Clawstone tours, and soon visitors are pouring through the gates. But just when things are looking up, the ghosts and children find themselves facing a great mystery, and some very sinister enemies. Will Madlyn, Rollo, and their ghostly friends find a way to save the day?

Which Witch? is a brilliantly witty tale of magic and marriage by Eva Ibbotson, and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. 'Find me a witch!' cried Arriman the Awful, feared Wizard of the North. Arriman has decided to marry. His wife must be a witch of the darkest powers - but which witch will she be? To find the most fiendish, he holds a spell-casting competition. Glamorous Madame Olympia performs the terrifying Symphony of Death and conjures up a thousand plague-bearing rats. The magic of gentle Belladonna, the white witch, goes hopelessly wrong. She produces perfumed flowers instead of snakes. And bats roost in her golden hair instead of becoming blood-sucking vampires. Poor Belladonna longs to be an evil enchantress - but how? 'This kind of fun will never fail to delight' Philip Pullman

When a Hag, an orphan boy and a troll called Ulf get sent to rescue a princess from an ogre, they expect it to be a fairly standard magical mission. But the ogre is depressed, the princess doesn't want to be rescued - and the ogre's dead wife is turning in her grave.

The ghosts of Britain need a sanctuary. Castles with central heating, bogs drained for motorways, dismal forests cleared for car parks-there are few places left for a respectable ghost to haunt. Humphrey the Horrible (actually his name is simply Humphrey-he added "the Horrible" to help himself become horrible) is a small, mostly unsuccessful ghost in a family of ghastly ghouls. His mother worries. But Humphrey has enough pluck to befriend a smart, politically aware schoolboy, Rick Henderson, who is willing to take the ghosts' cause right to the top, to number 10 Downing Street-home of the Prime Minister.

In 1896, in a pilgrim church in the Alps, an abandoned baby girl is found by a cook and a housemaid. They take her home, and Annika grows up in the servants' quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric Viennese professors. She is happy there but dreams of the day when her real mother will come to find her. And sure enough, one day a glamorous stranger arrives at the door. After years of guilt and searching, Annika's mother has come to claim her daughter, who is in fact a Prussian aristocrat and whose true home is a great castle. But at crumbling, spooky Spittal Annika discovers that all is not as it seems in the lives of her new-found family . . . Eva Ibbotson's hugely entertaining story is a timeless classic for readers young and old.

Spring, 1922 - Tessa is a beautiful, tiny, dark-eyed princess - who's given up her duties to follow her heart, working for nothing backstage at the Viennese opera. No one there knows who she really is, or that a fairytale castle is missing its princess, and Tessa is determined to keep it that way. But secret lives can be complicated. When a wealthy, handsome Englishman discovers this bewitching urchin backstage,Tessa's two lives collide - and in escaping her inheritance, she finds her destiny...

Tally Hamilton is furious to hear she is being sent from London to a horrid, stuffy boarding school in the countryside. And all because of the stupid war. But Delderton Hall is a far more" "unusual and " interesting" place than Tally ever imagined, and she soon falls in love with its eccentric staff and pupils. Now she's even organizing an exciting school trip to the kingdom of Bergania . . . although Tally never expected to meet the "prince." Prince Karil hates his life at the palace and he is only truly happy when he escapes to the dragonfly pool, a remote spot in the forests of Bergania. Then Karil meets a feisty English girl who brings the promise of adventure. But his country is under threat, and the prince soon looks to his new friend Tally for survival as well as friendship . . .

A new cover edition of Eva Ibbotson's wonderfully spooky young fiction title.

Anna, a young countess, has lived in the glittering city of St Petersburg all her life in an ice-blue palace overlooking the River Neva. But when revolution tears Russia apart, her now-penniless family is forced to flee to England. Armed with an out-of-date book on housekeeping, Anna determines to become a housemaid and she finds work at the Earl of Westerholme's crumbling but magnificent mansion. The staff and the family are sure there is something not quite right about their new maid - but she soon wins them over with her warmth and dedication. Then the young Earl returns home from the war - and Anna falls hopelessly in love. But they can never be together: Rupert is engaged to the snobbish and awful Muriel - and anyway, Anna is only a servant. Or so everybody thinks...

A collection of three wonderfully festive stories from Eva Ibbotson, the bestselling author of Journey to the River Sea. With a beautiful cover by Joe Wilson and inside illustrations, The Christmas Star is a wonderful gift to treasure at Christmas and all year round. In the first story - Vicky and the Christmas Angel - a young Viennese girl discovers, to her horror, who really brings the children's presents at Christmas. In The Christmas Star a family encounters a fortune teller at the local Christmas market who changes their lives. The Great Carp Ferdinand is a story about a hero with a difference as it follows the impact that Ferdinand - the carp intended for the Mannhaus family's Christmas dinner - has on the household in the lead-up to Christmas.