Best Selling Books by Robert Westall

After an air raid, a group of English children find a German machine gun and hide it from adults who are looking for it.

YA. A boy promises his life to a girl who dies. She pulls him to the brink of his own life during WWII.

There were three people, standing in the darkest place, watching him. Simon is outraged that his Mum plans to remarry. He can''t bear her new fiancé or the way his mother and sister seem to have forgotten his late father. Overwhelmed by hatred and anger he seeks solace in a nearby abandoned water mill. But another, powerful hatred lingers within its walls. And it is about to be unleashed... Westall''s immense talent is evident from the opening line - Simon''s anger and unhappiness are tangible, and the Scarecrows'' ill-intentions terrifying.

She made her way down the cliff, and on to the beach. At the edge of the waves, she stopped, shaking her wet paws. She knew that somewhere ahead was her person, but far, far away. She miaowed plaintively; stood staring at the moving blur of uncrossable sea. She led the way to safety, out of the blazing hell of blitzed Coventry. People touched her for luck; feared her as an omen of disaster. Wherever she went, she changed lives . . . From her beginning to her end she never wavered. She was the Blitzcat. Blitzcat by Robert Westall is the Smarties Prize-winning book about one brave cat''s experiences during World War Two. Now with a brilliant new cover look and including an extended author biography.

Tom Higgins, a British schoolboy during the Persian Gulf War, narrates his younger brother''s struggle with an apparent mental illness or "mystery of nature" which drives the child to assume the role of an Iraqi

Believing his parents to be killed by the bomb which destroyed his home, twelve-year-old Harry sets off on a journey of survival.

''Ninety-eight keys, none of them labelled. Ninety-eight keys, and they say there are ninety-nine rooms . . . What will you find in the ninety-ninth room, I wonder?'' Maggi is delighted when her father takes a new job, renovating a crumbling stately home in Cheshire. It''s a chance to escape from the North-East, from the predatory Doris Streeton, and perhaps from the grief at the heart of Maggi''s family. But Maggi gradually comes to realize that their new home holds secrets far more sinister than anything they have left behind . . .

Six tales, set in England, in which people engaged in ordinary pursuits attract the attention of supernatural forces.

Is there a barrier that divides the dark unknown from the everyday world around us? If so, is it broken sometimes by the dead returning, by the undead, or by alien creatures? What else could account for the chance meeting (or was it?) between a young student and hitch-hiker who turns out to be so much stranger than she seems? Why else should three successive crews flying a Second World War bomber - Blackham''s Wimpey - be driven to madness, despair, even to death, though the plane returns from each mission without a scratch? Who are Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou; the figments of Peter''s imagination that become a real life nightmare for Roger and Biddy? There is St Austin Friars, too: a church without a congregation - until a burial service, oddly arranged a month ahead, is attended by a sinister assortment of the living and the dead. And Sergeant Nice, an ordinary policeman in an ordinary seaside town faced with a series of quite extraordinary thefts; the work surely, of no human hand. Chilling, but often humorous as well, these stories creep up on you and take you by surprise.

An exciting new package for an 80,000-copy bestseller. In Robert Westall''s critically acclaimed novel, a courageous black cat journeys through war-torn England searching for her beloved master. A moving and stirring novel.--School Library Journal.

It''s 1940, and Britain is at war. Young Chas McGill has the second-best collection of war souvenirs in town, but desperately wants it to be the best. Amidst the bombs and air raids, Chas and his friends plan their own war effort in their newly built bunker. Friendships are forged and loyalties tested, in the adventure of a lifetime. Robert Westall''s "The Machine Gunners" has been read, studied - and loved - by successive generations of younger readers. It won the Carnegie Medal and was voted one of the most important children''s novels of the past seventy years. This thrilling stage adaptation comes from the award-winning playwright Ali Taylor, and premiered at the Polka Theatre, London. It provides rich opportunities for discussion in the classroom, and for staging by schools, youth theatres and amateur companies.