Inspired by a vacation to the Austrian Alps, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer wrote The School at the Chalet, launching a series that would span more than 60 books. The series follows the adventures of a boarding school set in the picturesque Swiss Alps. The series begins with The School at the Chalet (1925), where readers are introduced to Miss Madge Bettany, a young woman who decides to start a school for girls in the Swiss mountains. The series then chronicles the growth and evolution of the school, as well as the trials and triumphs of its students.

An established introductory textbook that provides students with a guide to developments in children's literature over time and across genres. This stimulating collection of critical essays written by a team of subject experts explores key British, American and Australian works, from picture books and texts for younger children, through to graphic novels and young adult fiction. It combines accessible close readings of children's texts with informed examinations of genres, issues and critical contexts, making it an essential practical book for students. This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on Children's literature which may be offered at the upper levels of an undergraduate literature or education degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying children's literature for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in literature or education. New to this Edition: - Revised and updated throughout in light of recent children's books and the latest research - Includes new coverage of key topics such as canon formation, fantasy and technology - Features an essay on children's poetry by the former Children's Laureate, Michael Rosen

THE FIRST ROYAL SPYNESS MYSTERY! The New York Times bestselling author of the Molly Murphy and Constable Evan Evans mysteries turns her attentions to “a feisty new heroine to delight a legion of Anglophile readers.”* London, 1932. Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, 34th in line for the English throne, is flat broke. She's bolted Scotland, her greedy brother, and her fish-faced betrothed. London is a place where she'll experience freedom, learn life lessons aplenty, do a bit of spying for HRH—oh, and find a dead Frenchman in her tub. Now her new job is to clear her long family name...

Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was born Gladys Eleanor May Dyer on April 6, 1894 in South Shields, in the northeast of England. She wrote over a hundred books of children’s literature during her life. From lower middle-class roots, she went to a small private school and became a teacher after attending the City of Leeds Training College. As a teacher, she worked at both public and private schools, and even as a governess. She had an interest in the theater, and her first book Gerry Goes to School (the first in her La Rochelle series) was written in 1922 --for the child actress Hazel Bainbridge. About this time, inspired by a vacation to the Austrian Alps, she wrote The School at the Chalet in 1923 (the first in her Chalet School series). Brent-Dyer continued to teach and tried rather unsuccessfully to run her own school from 1938 to 1948. After this, she quit teaching but continued writing until her death on September 20, 1969 in Redhill, Surrey.

This book examines school and college fiction for girls in Britain and the United States, written in the first half of the twentieth century, to explore the formation and ideologies of feminine identity. Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer develop a transnational framework that recognises how both constructed and essential femininities transcend national boundaries. The book discusses the significance and performance of female friendship across time and place, which is central to the development of the genre, and how it functioned as an important means of informal education. Stories by Jessie Graham Flower, Pauline Lester, Alice Ross Colver, Elinor Brent-Dyer, and Dorita Fairlie Bruce are set within their historical context and then used to explore aspects of sociability, authority, responsibility, domesticity, and possibility. The distinctiveness of this book stems from the historical analysis of these sources, which have so far primarily been treated by literary scholars within their national context. Winner of the History of Education Society Anne Bloomfield Prize for the best book on history of education published in English 2017-19

Susan Elia MacNeal introduced the remarkable Maggie Hope in her acclaimed debut, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. Now Maggie returns to protect Britain’s beloved royals against an international plot—one that could change the course of history. As World War II sweeps the continent and England steels itself against German attack, Maggie Hope, former secretary to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, completes her training to become a spy for MI-5. Spirited, strong-willed, and possessing one of the sharpest minds in government for mathematics and code-breaking, she fully expects to be sent abroad to gather intelligence for the British front. Instead, to her great disappointment, she is dispatched to go undercover at Windsor Castle, where she will tutor the young Princess Elizabeth in math. Yet castle life quickly proves more dangerous—and deadly—than Maggie ever expected. The upstairs-downstairs world at Windsor is thrown into disarray by a shocking murder, which draws Maggie into a vast conspiracy that places the entire royal family in peril. And as she races to save England from a most disturbing fate, Maggie realizes that a quick wit is her best defense, and that the smallest clues can unravel the biggest secrets, even within her own family.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife. In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

Part detective work, part treasure chest, full of history and scandal, The Gilded Chalet takes you on a grand tour of two centuries of great writing by both Swiss and foreign authors and shows how Switzerland has always been at the center of literary Europe. Two centuries after the Romantics went there to invent Gothic horror, the lure of Switzerland hasn't left us. Writers from the Fitzgeralds to Fleming, Highsmith to Hemingway, Conan Doyle to le Carré, came to escape world wars, political persecution, tuberculosis. They came for sanctuary (from oppression or the tax man), for fresh air and nude sunbathing, for scenery resembling, as Rooney puts it, 'Mother Nature on steroids.' Patricia Highsmith spent her last years in a granite home in Ticino with a fridge containing little but peanut butter and vodka. Hermann Hesse had himself buried to the neck as a cure for alcoholism. Nabokov chased butterflies and played tennis on the hotel courts. When it comes to literature, it seems all roads lead to Switzerland. Padraig Rooney peers through the chalet windows and discovers how Switzerland has influenced some of the greatest authors and characters of literature.

Gerald Wilkins, the world's youngest billionaire, is about to get more than he expected for Christmas. Gerald, Ruby and Sam are meeting up with Alisha and Gerald's Australian school friend Ox for two weeks of snowboarding in the mountains of California. It's a dream vacation. But soon after they arrive - by helicopter, with Gerald's butler Mr Fry at the controls, of course - the private chalet is attacked. Gerald and the gang escape through a secret passage, only to be pursued on snowmobiles by men with guns across frozen lakes and into the path of a cascading avalanche. Could this be the work of Gerald's nemesis Sir Mason Green, recently escaped from prison? Or is someone else behind the attack? Does the old dry cleaning ticket Gerald found amongst Green's belongings hold the key? And how does an invitation to join the secretive Billionaire's Club land Gerald in so much trouble? Join Gerald and his friends in the USA, the Czech Republic and a tiny island in Sweden for a new thrilling adventure. After all, with all that money, there's got to be more to the story.