This edited volume reviews the long career of Russell Hoban, an American writer residing in England who writes for children and adults. The Forty Years in the title refers to the length of Hoban's career to date. Hoban's contribution specifically to children's literature is commemorated in this volume of essays by international scholars,

Tom likes fooling around and is rather good at it, much to the annoyance of his Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. So one day this fearsome lady decides to teach Tom a lesson and summons Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen to play womble, muck and sneedball. Can it possibly end well for all concerned?

‘Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.’ Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, RIDDLEY WALKER is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern masterpiece.

He climbs a ladder to reach another man's wife and gives himself up to her beauty, but then Pilgermann descends into a mob of peasants inspired by the Pope to shed the blood of Jews. Alone on the cobblestones, mutilated and unmanned, he cries out to Israel, to the Lord his God, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He is answered instead by Jesus Christ: 'I'm the one you talk to from now on.' Every day is the Day of Reckoning and the judgement Christ brings is the start of straight action. Pilgermann hears a voice from within and becomes a pilgrim. Through time and war and Death itself, he makes his way along the road to Jerusalem, struggling to find God in the horror that surrounds him.

Includes "List of books indexed" (published also separately).

When eighty-three-year-old Irving Goodman falls in love with actress Justine Trimble she's been dead for forty-seven years. Irving may not know how he's going to attain his heart's desire but he knows a man who does. Istvan Fallok, a wizard of high technology, sees her on Irving's TV screen and hi-techs Justine out of the video tape and into present-day Soho - in black-and-white. As any reader of Bram Stoker will know, blood is the (full-colour) life and in order for Justine to retain her colour she has to be topped up now and then - by Irving and his friends and the odd passer-by. Things become a little complicated when Grace Kowalski brings a Justine Two into the picture and not surprisingly the curiosity of the police is soon aroused ...

"Like the fantasies of Tolkien, Thurber, E. B. White, The Mouse and His Child is filled with symbolism and satire, violence and vengeance, tears and laughter." -- The New York Times The images stay with you long after the book is done: the toy mouse and his father, on a journey together joined hand in hand; Manny Rat, the nefarious lord of the junkyard, stalking the toy mice for their clockwork parts; Uncle Frog, spouting wisdom and nonsense from within a glove; and the Bonzo Dog Food dog, repeating himself endlessly on a label, fading away to the last visible dog...Russell Hoban's novel is many things: a stirring adventure story, a sharp-witted comedy, and the moving tale of a father and son struggling to return to a state of grace.Called one of the great works of children's literature of the twentieth century -- but with an audience that spans ages and times -- The Mouse and His Child has been lovingly re-illustrated by Caldecott Medalist David Small for a new generation and a new millennium.

On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery ... Kleinzeit. In German that means 'hero'. Or 'smalltime'. It depends on whom you ask. 'Russell Hoban is our Ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Who but Russell Hoban could weave a tale of life’s pleasures and pain around a candy pig? And who but Quentin Blake could make the most poignant of stories so lighthearted and delightful? In this episodic picture book by an inimitable author-illustrator duo, a fantastic chain of events is triggered by the unacknowledged fall of a marzipan pig behind the sofa. We meet in quick succession a heartsick mouse, a lonely grandfather clock, an owl in love with a taxi meter, a worker bee, a fading hibiscus flower, a mouse who greets the dawn dancing, and finally a boy who guesses at the true relations between things. Appealing to the unsentimental yet sensitive nature of children, The Marzipan Pig is exquisitely attuned to the bittersweet wonder of life and to the sentience of all beings.

Two lonely Londoners bond over a plan to free the sea turtles at the city zoo in this touching novel from a cult-favorite author who has drawn comparisons to J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. A wise and touching classic that “crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony,” from the author of Riddley Walker (Time) Life in a city can be atomizing, isolating. And it certainly is for William G. and Neaera H., the strangers at the center of Russell Hoban’s surprisingly heartwarming novel Turtle Diary. William, a clerk at a used bookstore, lives in a rooming house after a divorce that has left him without home or family. Neaera is a successful writer of children’s books, who, in her own estimation, “looks like the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian. Looks…like a man’s woman who hasn’t got a man.” Entirely unknown to each other, they are both drawn to the turtle tank at the London Zoo with “minds full of turtle thoughts,” wondering how the turtles might be freed. And then comes the day when Neaera walks into William’s bookstore, and together they form an unlikely partnership to make what seemed a crazy dream become a reality.