I’m an American author who lived three years in a backyard tiny house with my family: husband, two young children, and a part-time dog. We wanted to live a bigger life, focused on our favorite activities and most important relationships. I wrote this book during the first spring of COVID-19, partly as a way to record my family’s experience weathering a pandemic in under 300 square feet, and partly as a way to explore the ways that children can be resourceful when life gives them a pinch. I've been a writer for most of my life, and I love to teach writing. Ark is my first middle-grade novel, and my lucky thirteenth book to publish!
This middle grade novel made about half of my graduate creative writing students cry! It tells a story of a family who loses their house during the Great Depression and must make their way living wild on a mountain in New England.
The narrator Ellie is wise, gritty, curious, and a natural healer who loves animals and feels what they feel: in her own words, she is an “echo girl.” Wolk has a poet’s heart and a perfect way of remembering what it’s like to be twelve.
"Historical fiction at its finest." -The Horn Book
"There has never been a better time to read about healing, of both the body and the heart." -The New York Times Book Review
Echo Mountain is an acclaimed best book of 2020! An NPR Best Book of the Year * A Horn Book Fanfare Selection * A Kirkus Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year * A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year
After losing almost everything in the Great Depression, Ellie's…
Anne was thirteen years old when she received this diary as a birthday gift, and she used her diary (which she calls “Dear Kitty”) to record her life in the Secret Annex, hiding with her family from the Nazis.
I used an epigraph for it in my book: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” This book offers a nightmarish, true portrait of life secreted away from the constant risk of harm and death. But shining through the terror is Anne’s unstoppable hope: her belief that people are good at heart.
With 30 per cent more material than previous editions, this new contemporary and fully anglicized translation gives the reader a deeper insight into Anne's world. Publication of the unabridged Definitive Edition on Penguin Audiobook, read by Helena Bonham-Carter, coincides.
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
The classic book on what happens when we dare to live differently: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”
Thoreau takes on the ordinary traps of daily life that humans so often fall into, and explores the spiritual costs of becoming human havings rather than human beings. This book contains everything: nature, philosophy, economics, a heady dose of DIY energy, and a reminder of how little it takes to live a very good life.
Henry David Thoreau is considered one of the leading figures in early American literature, and Walden is without doubt his most influential book.
Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.
It recounts the author's experiences living in a small house in the woods around Walden Pond near Concord in Massachusetts. Thoreau constructed the house himself, with the help of a few friends, to see if he could live 'deliberately' - independently and apart from society. The…
Granted, nobody would call a castle a small space, but the world of 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain—the narrator of this full-of-life novel-in-journal-form—is hemmed in by her father’s writer’s block and his innate dislike of neighbors, resulting in their family’s life of dwindling gentile poverty in a dilapidated rented castle.
Much of the novel’s long-lasting enchantment is how Cassandra makes the best of the stone walls that contain and border her life. Cassandra has a wonderful imagination and a knack for seeing her life as a story. A very funny and wise coming-of-age story about how our homes shape our world-views.
A wonderfully quirky coming-of-age story, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians is an affectionately drawn portrait of one of the funniest families in literature.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is illustrated by Ruth Steed, and features an afterword by publisher Anna South.
The eccentric Mortmain family have been rattling around in a…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
When she is bested by the overwhelming expense of paying for a bedroom in Britain, the author returns home to Cornwall, where she fixes up her father’s old work shed and there takes up residency.
A potent real-life story about a community that is so loved by vacationers that it loses its accessibility for locals, and about a young woman who finds an unusual way to make a home there, with hardly a wall separating her from the elements—especially the wild-surf ocean—that she feels she must live near in order to survive.
The story of a personal housing crisis that led to a discovery of the true value of home.
*'You will marvel at the beauty of this book, and rage at the injustice it reveals' George Monbiot*
*'Incredibly moving. To find peace and a sense of home after a life so profoundly affected by the housing crisis, is truly inspirational' Raynor Winn, bestselling author of The Salt Path*
Aged thirty-one, Catrina Davies was renting a box-room in a house in Bristol, which she shared with four other adults and a child. Working several jobs and never knowing if she could make…
Arden thinks the world has ended when her parents decide to trade their large house (where she has her own purple bedroom with a window seat!) for a small backyard guesthouse, built like a wooden boat. The worst part: it’s not big enough for their dog to come along. Things get even worse when her best friend moves away and a pandemic shuts school, leaving Arden’s family quarantined in very little space. Arden just wishes life would go back to normal.
As neighbors leave town, shut themselves away, and get sick, their pets are left behind, and Arden becomes the safe keeper of all the abandoned animals. When the pandemic touches home, Arden must use all her creativity and courage to help those she loves—family, friends, and dogs!
