When Nina's mother, Miranda, mysteriously disappears, Nina's father goes to look for her, leaving Nina with her two eccentric aunts who run a charity shop in town. Nina soon discovers that working in the shop can be funny, intriguing and rewarding as she takes in weird and wonderful donations, makes new friends and uncovers strange secrets! But Nina is determined to solve the mysteries that have taken over her life - where has her mother gone? Why did she leave so suddenly? And just what is the secret she's been hiding? Award-winning author Linda Newbery grips and entertains readers in her usual mesmerising way with this intriguing new mystery.

The legendary Oxford English Dictionary today contains over 600,000 words and a staggering 2,500,000 quotations to illuminate the meaning and history of those words. A glorious, bursting treasure-house, the OED serves as a guardian of the literary jewels of the past, a testament to the richness of the English language today, and a guarantor of future understanding of the language. In this book, Charlotte Brewer begins her account of the OED at the point where others have stopped--the publication of the final installment of the first edition in 1928--and carries it through to the metamorphosis of the dictionary into a twenty-first-century electronic medium. Brewer describes the difficulties of keeping the OED up to date over time and recounts the recurring debates over finances, treatment of contentious words, public vs. scholarly expectations, proper sources of quotations, and changing editorial practices. With humor and empathy, she portrays the predilections and personalities of the editors, publishers, and assistants who undertook the Sisyphean task of keeping apace with the modern explosion of vocabulary. Utilizing rich archives in Oxford as well as new electronic resources, the author uncovers a history no less complex and fascinating than the Oxford English Dictionary itself.

When Billy and his friends find a gold cup that has been missing for over thirty years, the Home School Detectives are thrown into their first cae.

Part one of an unusual and astonishing new fantasy trilogy that blends fine literary fare with a terrific romp through the reimagined outskirts of Victorian-era London In the imaginary borough of Filching, the extensive Iremonger family (“kings of mildew, moguls of mould”) have made a fortune from junk, building a dark and sprawling mansion from salvage scrap. Heap House is surrounded by the dangerous, noxious, shifting Heaps that stretch beyond its bounds. And within its walls, certain objects begin to display strange signs of life. Young Clod Iremonger is about to be "trousered" and betrothed (unwillingly) to his cousin Pinalippy when he meets the plucky orphan servant Lucy Pennant, with whose help he begins to uncover the dark secrets of his family’s empire. Mystery, romance and the perils of the Heaps await! Gorgeously (and ghoulishly) illustrated by the author, Heap House is peopled with unforgettable characters with delightfully skewed names--anxious, animal-loving Tummis with his pet seagull; menacing cousin Moorcus; dreadful Aunt Rosamud and more. As Carey writes, “Every life is thick with rubbish, but the Iremongers did it with a difference.”