New Releases by Sally Gardner

Arnold Ruben has created a memory machine, a utopia housed in a picture palace, where the happiest memories replay forever, a haven in which he and his precious daughter can shelter from the war-clouds gathering over 1937 Britain. But on the day of her seventeenth birthday Amaryllis leaves Warlock Hall and the world she has known and wakes to find herself in a desolate and disturbing place. Something has gone terribly wrong with her father''s plan. Against the tense backdrop of the second World War Sally Gardner explores families and what binds them, fathers and daughters, past histories, passions and cruelty, love and devastation in a novel rich in character and beautifully crafted.

With his beloved Sido safely in England and the Reign of Terror at its height, mysterious Yann returns to revolutionary France to smuggle out aristocratic refugees who will otherwise face the guillotine. But while the two are apart, YannÕs Gypsy origins prejudice SidoÕs guardian against their marriage, spoiling their reunion. When Sido is kidnapped under strange circumstances, Yann must use all his strength and courage to outwit the evil count, rescue Sido, and save all of France.

In the late eighteenth-century, Sido, the twelve-year-old daughter of a self-indulgent marquis, and Yann, a fourteen-year-old Gypsy orphan raised to perform in a magic show, face a common enemy at the start of the French Revolution.

The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. She is shut away in a chest and left to die, but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came, and where time has no meaning. When she returns, charged with a task that will transform her life, she is seventeen. This is a book filled with enchantments -- a pair of silver shoes, a fairy shadow, a prince transformed into a fox - that contrast with the heartbreaking loss and cruelty of Coriander''s life in the real world. With its brilliantly realized setting of old London Bridge, and underpinned by the conflict between Royalists and Puritans, it is a terrific page turner, involving kidnapping, murder and romance, and an abundance of vivid characters. Coriander is a heroine to love. Her story will establish Sally Gardner as a children''s writer of boundless imagination and originality.

This is the story of five little dolls that are left in a box, in a park, under a chair. Nobodyknows why they were left here, but one day, a couple of retired mice discover them, the box is blocking their doorway. Soon, the dolls and the mice become friends...except for the Countess, who''s a little too hoity-toity to befriend any mice. But she doesn''t have any choice and soon the dolls learn to stay away from the "legs" (humans), forage for food, and have a great deal of fun with the mice. The Countess''s Calamity is the first in a series of four books about these lost dolls called Tales from the Box.

A little girl''s concerns about her mother leaving her for the evening disappear once she finds out how much fun the babysitter can be.

A starkly original and heartbreaking tale of friendship and rebellion Winner of the Carnegie Medal and a 2012 Costa Award winner. Narrated against the backdrop of a ruthless regime determined to beat its enemies in the race to the moon, MAGGOT MOON is the stunning new novel from award-winning author Sally Gardner. When his best friend Hector is suddenly taken away, Standish Treadwell realises that it is up to him, his grandfather and a small band of rebels to confront and defeat the ever-present oppressive forces of the Motherland. Utterly original and stunning, it is impossible not to be moved by MAGGOT MOON's powerful story and the unforgettable heroism of Standish.

Cody Mack's misdeeds land him in a reformatory school, where he soon discovers that the principal and teachers are actual monsters with a sinister plan to alter the boys' brains.