Mal Peet

Orphaned as a child and sent to live among religious caretakers in Canada, Beck endures harsh labor and searches for love while traveling back and forth across the American border during the height of the Great Depression.

How hard can it be to write a fantasy trilogy? From Carnegie Medalist Mal Peet comes an outrageously funny black comedy about an impoverished literary writer who makes a pact with the devil.

Award-winning YA author Philip Murdstone is in trouble. His star has waned. The world is leaving him behind. His agent, the ruthless Minerva Cinch, convinces him that his only hope is to write a sword-and-sorcery blockbuster. Unfortunately, Philip—allergic

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In 1960s Norfolk, England, seventeen-year-old Clem Ackroyd lives with his mother and grandmother in a tiny cottage, but his life is transformed when he falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy farmer in this tale that flashes back through the stories of three generations.

Paul Faustino, known as the best soccer journalist in the business, reluctantly investigates the disappearance of eighteen-year-old Ricardo, a soccer prodigy known as "El Brujito, " while in alternate chapters a slave in old San Juan becomes a powerful voodoo priest.

Young Yazul's love for making kites with his grandfather meets with disapproval from his father, a lord along the Silk Road, until their community is attacked by bandits and Yazul and his grandfather use their skills to help. Yazul loves making kites with his grandfather, but all he truly desires is the approval of his father. Yazul's father, lord of a han along the Silk Road, is a man made stern by loneliness, and Yazul's love of kite-making only...

Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.