2001, The Cambridge University Press

Victor Watson edited this massive alphabetised Guide to children’s books, described by Philip Pullman as ‘indispensable’. He went on to say: ‘What I particularly like is the considered and richly informed writing by people of real stature in their fields.’

In recognition of the fact that a great deal of what children read has little to do with classrooms, or with what many adults think of as ‘literary’, there are entries on drama, television, comics, adventure game-books, and the growing range of media texts. The Guide also seeks to ensure that entries are neither blandly descriptive nor loftily patronising towards young readers – whose reading interests wherever possible should be acknowledged alongside the more available and articulate views of literary critics.

2021, Oldknow Books, Hemingford Grey

Lucy Boston – An Artist in Everything She Did draws on the expertise of a wide variety of writers to explore and illuminate the achievements of Lucy M. Boston. Although she is best-known for her Green Knowe series of children’s books, her extraordinarily wide-ranging and passionate imaginative life took her into other realms of creativity too. She wrote adult novels and memoirs, a number of supernatural stories, and poetry. Sound and music were also important to her, as were her garden, her patchworking, and her paintings.

Her creativity was supple and volatile, and her work mercurial, iridiscent, full of sound and colour and light, a personal patchwork of poetry, painting, novel-writing, needlework, gardening, and house restoration. Each of the contributors addresses and elucidates one of these aspects of Lucy’s life and thought.

The aim of this collection is to stitch together these disparate threads in a single work. Accordingly, there are chapters on her children’s books, her adult novels, her supernatural stories, her garden, her patchworking, her paintings, her extremely private poetry, and the importance of sound and music in her life.

An Artist in Everything She Did will be of interest to academics and to the many enthusiasts not predominantly concerned with either scholarship or children’s literature.