Leon Garfield: 23 books

One stormy December night some time in the eighteenth century, a coach came thundering down the long hill outside of Dorking on its usual journey into London. But something unusual was to happen that night as one of the passengers unexpectedly gave birth to a child. Not until he was eight did...

'When you take out the heart of gold, you must put something back in its place. Otherwise our princess would die.' Giorgio, a poor student, sets out on a journey to win the heart of Princess Charlotte of Oberweselberg. On the way an old woman promises he shall have the princess - but for a...

'As far as the eye can see, scarlet men are marching . . . A rich and splendid company, but none more so than the drummer boy.' But a moment later, the sound of Charlie Samson's drum was swallowed in a wild thunder. The glorious scarlet troops had been ambushed. Men were dead and dying all...

In a cave on the wild side of St James's Park live two ragged children; young Nick and his nine-year-old sister Jubilee. Once they had a father, but now they are alone – and Nick knows it is his responsibility to find Jubilee a husband. But who would want to marry a girl who can neither cook nor sew, read nor write?

In 1847, an orphaned baby is rescued as the sole survivor of a massacre in a Polish village. Many years later a mysterious and disturbed Russian lady turns up unexpectedly at one of Mr Dolly’s regular Friday night dinner parties. So begins a search for identity and lost inheritance in the seedy and crowded streets of nineteenth century London.

'Him what's born on the chime . . . he's the one what'll have communications with the devil.' At the age of fourteen, 'chime-child' Peter Gannet is apprenticed to a locksmith in Covent Garden. But his desperate longing to escape from the insufferable adults around him and go to sea leads him...

A New York Review Children's Collection Original The Complete Bostock and Harris combines two delightful, suspenseful, and madly funny tales about two boys in eighteenth-century England, clever and mischievous Harris and sweet but not-so-bright Bostock, who in spite of their differences are...

Two boys, Lewis and Richard, travel to paris in 1789 for very different reasons, and find their ideals challenged in the events of the French Revolution and the September massacre.

Death is a much avoided topic. Literature on mourning exists, but it focuses chiefly upon the death of others. The inevitable psychic impact of one's own mortality is not optimally covered either in this literature on mourning or elsewhere in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The Wound of Mortality brings...