New Releases by JILL PATON. WALSH

Lord Peter and Harriet return to the scene of their literate courtship to resolve an Oxford University dispute that is complicated by the disappearance of several prominent Fellows.

A re-issue of a forgotten favourite, FIREWEED is an evocative and unflinching story of wartime survival for younger readers Bill is a fifteen-year-old runaway evacuee, and he''s finding that surviving on the streets of London is pretty easy, thank you very much. He''s fed by a local cafe owner, he earns some cash as a barrow-boy in Covent Garden, and sleeping in the Underground air-raid shelters is cosy - if a bit smelly. Things get more complicated for Bill with the arrival of Julie. She''s a runaway too, and although she''s a bit posh, she''s just as determined as Bill to stay free of interfering parents and ''the social''. But although it''s fun for a while to duck Jerry missiles and camp out in bombed-out houses, the reality of living through the Blitz quickly begins to set in. Winter is coming, and Bill and Julie will discover that playing at being grown-ups can be a very dangerous game.... First published in 1969, and winner of the 1970''s Book World Festival Award, FIREWEED evokes a time of tin Spitfires, powdered eggs, warm woollen mittens and reading by firelight. Perfect for readers young and old, this book is a beautifully written classic, full of adventure, heroism and British wartime courage.

Jill Paton Walsh''s classic science fiction novel The Green Book is now available from Square Fish with a brand–new cover! Pattie and her family are among the last refugees to flee a dying Earth in an old spaceship. And when the group finally lands on the distant planet which is to be their new home, it seems that the four-year journey has been a success. But as they begin to settle this shiny new world, they discover that the colony is in serious jeopardy. Nothing on this planet is edible, and they may not be able to grow food. With supplies dwindling, Pattie and her sister decide to take the one chance that might make life possible on Shine.

The miner''s work is hard-they need pasties to keep them going. When Thomas shares his pasty with a small miner, he is rewarded with a wish. But soon, more miners appear and Thomas regrets his kindness-until he faces an even bigger problem...

Sometimes, Birdy watches her father row people across the dangerous sea, but when the wrinkled old woman asks to be ferried across, Birdy jumps in too. The woman tells Birdy that she has second sight, but Birdy isn''t sure she wants this special gift. However, soon she finds that looking twice at things can bring the most unexpected results . . . With an engaging story told in short chapters, and illustrations in black and white and colour on every double-page spread, this short novel is ideal for newly confident readers.

''A jewel in the traditional English detective mode . . . Ms. Morse has arrived'' Observer According to certain Cambridge scholars, the locked library of St Agatha''s College is home to an unrivalled - and deeply uninteresting - collection of seventeenth century volumes. It also contains one dead student. At first glance it seems like a tragic accident - even if malicious rumours suggest that Philip Skellow had been stealing books rather than acquiring knowledge when he''d slipped, banged his head, and bled to death overnight. Only Imogen Quy, the college nurse, has her doubts. And before long, another student is found, drowned in an ornamental fountain . . .

When Marion''s mother is silenced, first by a stroke, and then by death, she is left confronting the chaotic detritus of a life obsessively devoted to art. she has left it too late to ask the crucial questions about scenes confusedly remembered from her childhood, and above all about the identity of her own father, ''lost in the war''. Out of the hundreds of paintings in her mother''s studio, one, a portrait of a young man, is inscribed ''For Marion''. Is this her father? And who was he? Marion''s search takes her to the Cornish town of St Ives. In the remote and closeknit town where communities of fisherfolk and artists have coexisted for many years, she learns of a tragedy which is intrinsically tied up with her father''s life. Over fifty years before, the St Ives lifeboat went down with all hands bar one. Marion must delve deep into the past to discover the identity of a man she never knew,a nd in so doing confront the demons which have tortured her own adult life. The Serpentine Cave is an imagined story containing a true one - a powerful novel about memory and loss, birth and rebirth, and past regrets which still have the power to plague the present.

The long-awaited new Lord Peter Wimsey novel, telling the story of his first case and his last. Paton Walsh, takes over from Dorothy L Sayers to bring back Lord Wimsey.

Imogen Quy puts her sleuthing skills to work to uncover the truth behind a research fellow''s mysterious death, and an undergraduate student confronts the suspected killer through an unorthodox production of Hamlet.

Sixty years after Dorothy L. Sayers began her unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Thrones Dominations, Booker Prize finalist Jill Paton Walsh took on the challenge of completing the manuscript---with extraordinary success. "The transition is seamless," said the San Francisco Chronicle; "you cannot tell where Sayers leaves off and Walsh begins." "Will Paton Walsh do it again?" wondered Ruth Rendell in London''s Sunday Times. "We must hope so." Jill Paton Walsh fulfills those hopes in A Presumption of Death. Although Sayers never began another Wimsey novel, she did leave clues. Drawing on "The Wimsey Papers," in which Sayers showed various members of the family coping with wartime conditions, Walsh has devised an irresistible story set in 1940, at the start of the Blitz in London. Lord Peter is abroad on secret business for the Foreign Office, while Harriet Vane, now Lady Peter Wimsey, has taken their children to safety in the country. But war has followed them there---glamorous RAF pilots and even more glamorous land-girls scandalize the villagers, and the blackout makes the nighttime lanes as sinister as the back alleys of London. Daily life reminds them of the war so constantly that, when the village''s first air-raid practice ends with a real body on the ground, it''s almost a shock to hear the doctor declare that it was not enemy action, but plain, old-fashioned murder. Or was it? At the request of the overstretched local police, Harriet reluctantly agrees to investigate. The mystery that unfolds is every bit as literate, ingenious, and compelling as the best of original Lord Peter Wimsey novels.

When Sir Julius Farran dies suddenly, followed shortly after by his son-in-law, St Agatha''s College is in real danger of bankruptcy. With Imogen Quy''s one-time lover one of the prime suspects, she decides to find out what really happened.

Booker Prize finalist Walsh returns to her series set at Cambridge Universityfeaturing amateur sleuth Imogen Quy.

"As divided post-war Europe unravels around them, they must make what they can of lives buffeted by circumstance. For many, individual freedom is at best problematic. For better or worse, communities are destroyed, families uprooted, and the ties of trust, friendship and duty which bind them together are broken down by the implacably irresolvable forces at work."--BOOK JACKET.

Deemed "one of the greatest mystery writers of this century" by the Los Angeles Times, Dorothy L. Sayers first captivated readers nearly seventy years ago with her beloved sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in the novel Stong Poison. In Busmans's Honeymoon, her last completed Wimsey/Vane novel, Lord Peter and Harriet culminated their partnership with marriage. Now Thrones, Dominations, Sayers' uncompleted last novel, satisfies the vast readership hungry to know what happened after the honeymoon. Here award-winning author Jill Paton Walsh picks up where Sayers left off, bringing Wimsey and Vane brilliantly to life in Sayers' unmistakable voice. Readers and reviewers are rejoicing at the return of this delightful sleuthing couple--as adept at solving a baffling murder mystery as they are a balancing the delicate demands of their loving union.

A grandmother tells her grandson what life was like when she was as little as he is now.

The recent heir to her grandmother's house, a young girl rents it for the summer to a professor and a group of students whose long, abstract, philosophical discussions become meaningful to her as the summer wears on.

Robert won''t share his train or any of his toys with Connie when she comes to play - until Connie shares a story with him and then they both play with all the toys together.

"Once a year cousins Madge and Paul visit Goldengrove, their grandmother''s idyllic Cornish home. But one year as Summer turns to Autumn and as they are drawn from childhood to maturity, their seemingly indomitable grandmother turns to Winter, and the precious moments of innocence begin to be leached away... Years later Madge, now living at Goldengrove, reflects on her own grandchildren and the events and revelations which disturbed the tranquill idyll that was her childhood. With wisdom and understanding, Jill Paton Walsh creates memorable mood-music for the ebb and flow, calm and storm of changing lives and in so doing has formed a lasting tale of innocence and beauty. An extremely good story, marvellously told. As the story gathers momentum, the deeply understood characters, the golden atmosphere, the small change of everyday pleasures and ageless tragedies are all put over with such newly seen immediacy and such controlled mastery that the reader is carried along like a surf rider on the crest of a wave, knowing it must soon break'' Times Literary Supplement ''Written with an intensity of feeling and care, with a Woolf-like awareness of the instant''s sensation: a story

Prince Dhutmose has commanded a splendid tomb to be built for his final journey to the Land of the Dead. Pepi''s father is to decorate it, but how can he paint the unimaginable - the Lions of the Horizon, the terrible gods Horus the Hawk and Sebek the crocodile, and Mertseger the deadly Winged Cobra? Pepi decides to find real-life models for his father, using his knowledge of secret names.In this enthralling, magically illustrated story, young readers can solve the secret names for themselves, using a simple hieroglyphics key to enter the mysterious world of ancient Egypt.

From the Booker Prize shortlisted author of Knowledge of Angels, this novel is of two interwoven stories worked around the theme of Mozart''s Cosi Fan Tutte, which explores love and infidelity.

In Cambridge, England, three writers undertake to write a mathematician's biography and each in turn comes to an untimely end. To find out why, PI Imogen Quy, the school nurse at St. Agatha's College, travels to Wales, to discover genius, jealousy and murder.

Peopled by peasants, servants, shepherds, priests, nuns young and old, Knowledge of Angels sets off a wonderful fireworks of attitudes toward God and poses a hundred unrelenting questions.

On a stormy night, Grace, the daughter of a light-house keeper, rowed to the rescue of a foundering ship. Her heroic actions made her a name in history, but the consequences were more fearsome ..._

Birdy rescues Matthew from his orphan master and discovers that he has a voice of priceless beauty that eventually causes his mysterious disappearance. Will Birdy be able to save him?

In this exciting historical adventure, a famished, exhausted, and terrified boy drops from the tree in which he has hidden just as Constantine, last Emperor of the Romans, is about to receive his crown. Thus Piers Barber, shipwrecked young seaman from Bristol, England, now renamed Vrethiki ("lucky find"), becomes an unwilling talisman to the Emperor, for it has been prophesied that if even one person who is at his side when he takes the crown stays with him always, the City will not perish. Jill Paton Walsh brings a meticulous eye for detail and storyteller''s skill to this tale of the fall of Constantinople and the siege that marked the end of the Byzantine Empire. Fractured by bitter rivalries and corruption, the City nevertheless inspired its defenders to extraordinary feats. Through the darkening months, Vrethiki finds renewed faith, inspired too to see the City as a vision worth dying for and the Emperor as his own true lord.

Although Grandma has seen many wonderful sights around the world, none compare to the wonder of her bouncy, growing, "heaven-and-earthly" granddaughter Madeleine.

James''s difficulty in adjusting to a new school and life in the Fens is further complicated by the request of an elderly neighbor to find his lucky piece, a task which puts James in some danger.

Pat Riley and John Aston take John''s father''s boat across the English Channel to help British soldiers stranded on the shores of Dunkirk, little realizing the kinds of risks they are taking, and the sort of courage their journey will demand.