Youth literature

A young, awkward and very self-centered English girl leading a sheltered life with her family in India is suddenly orphaned when her parents and many others are killed during an outbreak of cholera. She’s sent back to England to stay with an eccentric uncle who leads an isolated existence in a very large manor in Yorkshire, where she learns a great deal about life, about relating with other people, about the beauties of the resplendent countryside there — and where she discovers a wonderful (…)

Rudyard Kipling’s delightful collection of little stories for young children – first written as bedtime stories for his little daughter – explaining how whales, camels, elephants and other creatures first got to become the way they are, and also just how numbers, letters and the alphabet were first invented.
A treat for young and old alike.
(29,000 words) An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. HOW THE WHALE GOT HIS THROAT 2. HOW THE CAMEL GOT HIS HUMP 3. (…)

The wonderful account of the voyage of a young farm boy who’s been transformed by an elf into a minuscule elf-size figure and who has a series of exciting adventures flying all around Sweden with a flock of wild geese at the turn of the 20th Century.
A timeless modern classic justly famous throughout Scandinavia and elsewhere, celebrating the call of the far-off and the love of the land – and not without many very good lessons for young boys and others on how to behave to animals and (…)

Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated stories about life in the jungles of India, featuring notably the story of the abandoned boy Mowgli who has been adopted by a wolf pack, recounting his adventures with many other animals, notably the tiger Shere Khan, Baloo the bear and Kaa the python.
The other tales – all most charming and even instructive, and all with a distinctive poetical touch – involve the struggle of seals to survive the menace of mankind, the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and his epic (…)

Lewis Carroll’s wonderful sequel to "Alice in Wonderland" where Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red and Black Queens and Knights, Tiger-Lily, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the Frog and the Gnat and the Lion and the Unicorn and talking flowers and so many other aspects of life – and language – on the other side of the mirror.
An all-time classic, thoroughly imbued with the charm and linguistic subtleties of Lewis Carroll’s inimitable style and imagination, as (…)

“One” of the most charming stories ever written with young people in mind, the account of how Wendy and her brothers meet up with a little boy who refuses to grow up, Peter Pan, who teaches them how to fly so that they can escape with him and his fairy companion Tinker Bell to Neverland, the land of mermaids and fairies and the Never bird, where they join the Lost Boys and have to deal with redskins and wolves and the pirates of the formidable Captain Hook as well as a terrible crocodile (…)

One of the best books for younger readers ever written - anyone who has not read this book around the age of 12 years or so has missed something important in the growing-up experience !
The writing is splendidly taut, the story moves along steadily at a nice pace, the bad guys are really well done – unlike the current mythology, pirates are not portrayed as romantic rebels or gentlemen of fortune revelling in their marginal ways, but as the savage cut-throat scum that they really were – (…)

Written in 1862 by the Oxford lecturer in mathematics Charles Dodgson (1832-1898) to amuse Alice Liddell, one of the daughters of the dean of his Christ Church faculty, this brilliant, inventive, very original and very funny tale gained immediate world-wide attention when it was published in 1865 under the pen-name Lewis Carroll.
With its subtle psychology, its insights into the world of childhood, its linguistic creativity and its clever wit it has become one of the best-known and most (…)

Marie’s godfather is a very talented watchmaker who gives his grandchildren a castle with a marvellous set of animated figures on Christmas Eve – and a strangely realistic little figure with a large head that can crack nuts with its teeth. These presents are carefully put away by the parents for safekeeping out of reach of the children in a large showcase in the front hall, and Marie lingers there at midnight to admire them when she sees a group of mice led by their strange seven-headed king (…)

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) was a prolific author of novels, short stories, poetry and theatre plays who achieved everlasting posthumous fame when this wonderful story about the adventures of Dorothy and her faithful companions (her dog Toto, a scarecrow without brains, a tin woodman without a heart and a cowardly lion) was made into a memorable Hollywood musical film in 1939 starring the young Judy Garland and directed by Victor Fleming that was later classified by the Library of Congress as (…)