Badger Girl's delighted to find the biggest turnip she's ever seen growing in her vegetable garden, but when the time comes to harvest the giant root, she's unable to pull it up without help from family and friends.

Find out what happens when the old woman, the old man, and all twenty-one animals on the farm try to harvest a rather large root vegetable. This well-loved Russian tale uses humor, counting and repetition to appeal to beginner readers.

A rare discovery in the world of fairy tales—now for the first time in English Move over, Cinderella: Make way for the Turnip Princess! And for the “Cinderfellas” in these stories, which turn our understanding of gender in fairy tales on its head. With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales—the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen—becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth's work was lost—until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manu­scripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive. Now, for the first time, Schönwerth's lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

One of an old man's turnips grows to such an enormous size that he needs the help of his wife, a little girl, a dog, a cat, and a mouse to pull it up.

Using rhythmic text to help build reading skills, combined with original illustrations, the books in this series offer quirky, humorous retellings of traditional children's tales.

The mouse added just the necessary weight to the line formed by all those trying to pull up the giant turnip.

Usborne Guided Reading Packs have been developed and endorsed by top reading experts to provide teachers with exciting, effective and practical classroom resources. Oliver Twist is part of the Usborne Reading Programme Young Reading Series 3 and is suitable for National Curriculum level 4A.