Cam is quick-witted and clever - sometimes too clever for his own good. When he finds himself in a spot of trouble, he's keen to take a job that will get him out of the way for a while, even if it means he doesn't look at it too closely. Tasked to take a letter to a far-off city - simple enough, you would think - he instead finds himself caught up in intrigue and dangers beyond those he was escaping, and in possession of a cursed knife he cannot get rid of. And that's before he even looks at the city's cats. The city's very unusual, unexpectedly intelligent cats. The city's unusual, intelligent and slightly magical cats, whose fates are now entwined with his.

In medieval France, huge, powerful cats and a magic dagger help Cam, a young English jack-of-all-trades, through a series of unusual and dangerous adventures.

Edited by Morag Styles and written by an international team of acknowledged experts, this series provides jargon-free, critical discussion and a comprehensive guide to literary and popular texts for children. Each book introduces the reader to a major genre of children's literature, covering the key authors, major works and contexts in which those texts are published, read and studied. The development of the horror genre in children's literature has been a startling phenomenon - one that has provoked strong, but mixed, reactions. Frightening Fiction provides a lucid and lively guide to that genre, ranging from analyses of such popular series as Point Horror, Goosebumps, the X Files and the Buffy stories, to the work of individual authors such as Robert Westall, David Almond, Philip Gross and Lesley Howarth.

An intelligent, amusing, and affectionate look at cats in history, literature, and art

Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.

Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.

The book focuses on individuals writing in the '90s, but also includes 12 classic authors (e.g., Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, J.R.R. Tolkien) who are still widely read by teens. It also covers some authors known primarily for adult literature (e.g., Stephen King) and some who write mainly for middle readers but are also popular among young adults (e.g., Betsy Byars). An affordable alternative to multivolume publications, this book makes a great collection development tool and resource for author studies. It will also help readers find other books by and about their favorite writers.