Linda Talbot: 16 books

A little girl is bewitched by the Fairy Queen - her eyes turn green, her face grows grey, her voice is stolen,"her long pigtails knotted and she'll have to eat toadstools until she turns spotted." This is Heidi's fate in this collection for children: Heidi's House and Other Rhymes. Luckily...

Toby is getting ready for school when he notices his feet have turned GREEN! Alarmed and thoroughly mystified, he pulls on his socks and sets off. But he is waylaid by a little man who is green from head to toe! As Toby turns even greener he is whirled away by other little green men, is finally arrested and charged in court with being green in a public place. What will become of him?

When Granny Pegg loses a leg to a hungry crocodile at the zoo, she is undaunted and gets a wooden one,for which she finds many uses, from rolling pastry to beating time to the band in the park. But, in "Granny Pegg's Great Chase" the best use for it comes when she apprehends a thief in the corner...

"In the Eye of the Storm" is a collection of verse in three sections. "Demeter's Dance" conveys mysterious or disquieting aspects of nature. In the poem "To Marcus by the Corn", the past one can feel locked beneath the earth of a Suffolk field, seems, momentarily, to uncannily possess the boy...

The volcanic Greek island of Santorini evokes an eerie potential for fantasy. Chunks of solidified lava turn into a strange bestiary, the deep caldera might mask a multitude of monsters. "On the Island of Fire" comprises four improbable tales for children set on the island, and opens with...

The eleven stories in "The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow", are often rooted in reality. But they soon become improbably perturbing, droll or outlandish. However, in The Soul Shadow - the first story - we are already in a weird and wonderful future, whose equilibrium is threatened...

The Muffkins - Willie, Millie and their parents - are a family of toys, weary of being badly treated by Big Bunty. In this story - "The Muffkins and the Magic Fernseed", they hear Bunty's mother tell her a story about magic fernseed that can cause invisibility. When the Muffkins are washed downstream...

In “The Bamboozling of Bazalob", Derry and Jude are carried in a giant travelling pot to rescue their cousin Katie, from Bazalob, a gross concoction of beast, bird and fish. The children are guided by Mikono, the spirit of the pot and en route they enlist the help of bouncing Blodder, weird Gingali...

In "The Jinni of Dreams" - a tale for children - Lissie and Brin are feeding Randy, Brin's rabbit, when a jinni - a magical spirit from the desert - appears in the back garden. He declares he can grant the children wishes if they carry out some tricky tasks. They agree to try. There is Tog, the...

"Clumsilla's Flight Through Time" and "Taming of the Tokhashi" are two stories whisking children from their everyday lives to lands of compelling dangers and delights.Clumsilla meets Zigana, the celestial gipsy, who enables her to fly on a worn hearthrug (not a magic carpet), to the past inhabited...

The stories in A Walk on the Weird Side flirt with outlandish fancy. They include unfettered fantasy in Orchis Amoroso where an orchid engenders a bizarre encounter between a human and a potently bizarre being, a haunting experience among the spheres in a tale told from the grave in Music of a Golden...

Zophenas is an enchantress but is trapped in the Underearth. How can she escape? She has heard of three possible ways; to find the soul of Waldo the warlock, to secure the magic ointment made by a witch, enabling her to fly and to capture a woman who has turned into a two-tailed cat.For these tasks...

In Gods and Green Fingers discover how myths emerged from a profusion of simple plants and how we can cultivate these plants today. This anthology for plant lovers combines fact with fiction. Insights into plants, from familiar flowers to trees, climbers and curiosities - are interspersed with short...

In these twelve stories in Book Two of Time Trance of the Gods, the power of myth moves again through time,to manipulate man as he muddles along or takes misguided decisions. "The White Shell" for instance, is inspired by the tale of Tereus, who acted as mediator for a king, married one...