Nina Bawden Libri

Determined to find the ex-lodger who stole his grandmother's savings, Fred McAlpine and his friends Sid, Rosie, Algy and Clio launch on a series of sleuthing activities to trace the thief.

In this, her autobiography, author Nina Bawden tells of her evacuation to Suffolk and Wales during World War II, where she was billeted with seven different families, and of her years at Oxford, where she knew Richard Burton and Margaret Thatcher.

Circles of Deceit is narrated by a painter who specializes as a copyist. Major figures on the canvas are Clio, his child-bride; Helen, his first wife; and his mother Maisie. They confound lies and the truth in a subtle weave, while the silent agony of the painter's son is a poignant reflection on the busy web of deception. And as the copyist transcribes his modern versions of Old Masters, so the past keeps breaking through the surface of the present, until fact and fiction, like art and life, meet in a remarkable conclusion.

Alternative cover edition here On the Scottish island of Skua, a friendship develops between lonely and mysterious Perdita and a blind girl and her brother as the threesome look for rare orchids, explore the island caves, and meet up with jewel thieves.

Albert, Carrie and young Nick are war-time evacuees whose lives get so tangled up with the people they've come to live among that the war and their real families seem to belong to another world. Carrie and Nick are billeted in Wales with old Mr Evans, who is so mean and cold, and his timid mouse of a sister, Lou, who suddenly starts having secrets. Their friend Albert is luckier, living in Druid's Bottom with warm-hearted Hepzibah Green and the strange Mister Johnny, who can talk to animals but not to human beings. Carrie and Nick visit him there whenever they can for Hepzibah makes life exciting and enticing with her stories and delicious cooking. Gradually they begin to feel more at ease in their war-time home, but then, in trying to heal the rift between Mr Evans and his estranged sister, and save Druid's Bottom, Carrie does a terrible thing which is to haunt her for years to come. Carrie revisits Wales as an adult and tells the story to her own children.

At the age of 13, Jane discovers that her seaman father has remarried and that she has a half brother and sister somewhere. She longs to meet them but her stepmother doesn't want her children to know about Jane. The author also wrote Peppermint Pig, The Runaway Summer and Squib.

Nina Bawden is a longstanding author on the VMC list, but this is the first time we will publish her children's novels. Carrie's War and The Peppermint Pig are firm favourites: Keeping Henry has been out of print for years but is such a winning combination of the two earlier books that there is already an audience for this lost gem.

While staying with their aunt in an English seaside town, the Mallory children find a secret passage into the mysterious old house next door, where their efforts to help a strange girl lead to trouble and adventure.

Nina Bawden's great talent is to be able to take you along a perfectly ordinary street, rip the facade away and show the strange and passionate events that go on behind closed doors' Daily Telegraph

This is Virago's first publication of one of Nina Bawden's most famous books for children. The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction, has been a great favourite since it was first published, over forty years ago.