At bedtime a young boy takes a trip on his toy train and rescues several endangered animals. Suggested level: junior, primary.

At bedtime a young boy takes a trip on his toy train and rescues several endangered animals.

While her mother chats away, Shirley is busy escaping into a world of adventure, bold knights, green forests - and plastic ducks.

Mr. Gumpy accepts more and more riders on his boat until the inevitable occurs.

SUMMARY: Shirley's adventures at the beach are interspersed with familiar parental warnings.

One evening Marie Elaine and her neighbor Norman go with Malcolm the cat to a secret place, where they dance and party with the Queen of the Cats.

Mr Gumpy has decided to go for a ride in his motor car. It's a nice day and the sun is shining, so off he goes. But he only gets as far as the lane before the children, the rabbit, the cat, the dog, the pig, the sheep, the chickens, the calf and the goat ask if they can come along too. As the motor car and its passengers make their way across the field, the weather begins to turn and the rain is soon pouring down. The tyres cannot grip the muddy ground, so Mr Gumpy asks for volunteers to push the car. But everyone has an excuse, until it gets so bad that they all have to get out and help. Eventually, the sun shines once more as they drive across the bridge - and there's time for a swim on the way home.

Once upon a time there were two geese called Mr and Mrs Plumpster. Each Spring they returned to the marshes of their ancestors, and Mrs Plumpster laid her eggs. Soon six fine young Plumpsters hatched: Archie, Freda, Jennifer, Oswald, Timothy and Borka. But Borka was different. Borka had no feathers and could not fly. When winter came the other geese flew off in search of warmer climates, leaving Borka all alone. But her adventure was only just beginning . . .

Published here for the first time in English, "Where the Trains Turn" won first prize in the Finnish science-fiction magazine Portti's annual short story competition and then went on to win the Atorox Award for best Finnish science fiction or fantasy short story. I don't like to think about the past. But I cannot stop remembering my son. Emma Nightingale prefers to remain grounded in reality as much as possible. Yet she's willing to indulge her nine year-old son Rupert's fascination with trains, as it brings him closer to his father, Gunnar, from whom she is separated. Once a month, Gunnar and Rupert venture out to follow the rails and watch the trains pass. Their trips have been pleasant, if uneventful, until one afternoon Rupert returns in tears. "The train tried to kill us," he tells her. Rupert's terror strikes Emma as merely the product of an overactive imagination. After all, his fears could not be based in reality, could they? "In this long novella, the details are presented meticulously, building characters and atmosphere layer on layer."--Locus At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A teacher regrets his decision to disbelieve a student's outlandish excuses for being late.