After being told that his father was an assassin for a criminal organization, fourteen-year-old Alex goes to Italy to find out more and becomes involved in a plan to kill thousands of English schoolchildren.

Roberta, Phyllis and Peter have their comfortable lives in London thrown into disarray by the unexpected disappearance of their father. They are forced to move to a small cottage in the countryside with their mother, who struggles to make ends meet by writing books. The children find solace in a stretch of railway track and the station nearby, and befriend the railway porter, who teaches them about running the station, and an old gentleman who takes...

When Will Burrows and his friend Chester embark on a quest to find Will's archaeologist father, who has inexplicably disappeared, they are led to a labyrinthine world underneath London, full of sinister inhabitants with evil intentions toward "Topsoilers" like Will and his father.

Plunging from a well-bred lady to society's most scandalous outcast, one woman faces danger and romance with a determination to live on her own terms.

A master of deductive reasoning who can solve the most difficult crimes by spotting obscure clues overlooked by others, dilettante sleuth Sherlock Holmes was the hero of sixty stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927. He even rose from the dead after Doyle tried to dispatch him in his twenty-fourth adventure, and readers protested. Here, in one volume, are all four full-length novels and fifty-six short stories about the colourful...

"They said his uncle Ian died in a car accident. But Alex Rider knows that's a lie, and the bullet holes in the windshield prove it. Yet he never suspected the truth: his uncle was really a spy for Britain's top secret intelligence agency. And now Alex has been recruited to find his uncle's killers . . ." --

"Written deliberately to increase the circulation of Dickens's weekly magazine, Household Words, Hard Times was a huge and instantaneous success upon publication in 1854. Yet this novel is not the cheerful celebration of Victorian life one might have expected from the beloved author of The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop. Compressed, stark, allegorical, it is a bitter exposé of capitalist exploitation during the industrial revolution-and...

London is a ruin, destroyed by German bombs, ravaged by the Horologia virus, and ruled by the ruthless Captain Hanz Otto Oswald Kretschmer, whose Marauders search for and seize the children who are immune to the virus in the hope that their blood will produce a cure. Their latest victim is sixteen-year-old Gwen Darling's younger sister and Gwen will do anything to get her back, even join up with Pete and his gang of Lost Boys living in a city hidden...

In late seventeenth-century England, eleven-year-old Digory, forced to leave his hometown after his father is lost at sea, becomes an apprentice to the architect Henry Winstanley, who built a lighthouse on the treacherous Eddystone Reef--the very rocks that sank Digory's grandfather's ship years before.

Xanthe and her mother Flora leave London behind for a fresh start, taking over an antique shop in the historic town of Marlborough. Xanthe has always had an affinity with some of the antiques she finds. When she touches them, she can sense something of the past they come from and the stories they hold. So when she has an intense connection to a beautiful silver chatelaine she has to know more. It's while she's examining the chatelaine that she's transported...