Tales of London Town
STOP PRESS! This title is now open for pre-ordering!*
A brand new collection of Joan Aiken’s stories and novellas - each set in a magical “other” London.
We are thrilled to be publishing this beautiful book as the latest in the Manderley Press list - released to celebrate the centenary of the author’s birth.
It is introduced by the award-winning and best-selling author Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and illustrated by the renowned artist Annabel Pearl, both of whom are huge devotees of Aiken’s writing, and London Town too!
Tales of London Town takes us on an exhilarating journey through parts of the city we never knew existed, and lingers in Rumbury Town - an ancient and rather wild part of London, as imagined through each individual novella by master story-teller Joan Aiken.
Rumbury Town is “an ancient, dusty, twisty, cobbly, narrow-laned quarter of north London. It has a canal, a hill, several venerable rail stations, an overgrown cemetery, a stretch of marshland known as Rumbury Waste, rows of little shops selling very odd goods, and some extremely ancient houses.”
Tales of London Town will carry you away a while and let you linger in unheard-of corners of London so immaculately conjured you could swear you’ve just not checked the tube map hard enough.’
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Each book ordered through the website is wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a matching silk ribbon, free of charge - and also includes an exclusive bookmark designed to complement the cover design and only available with books ordered through our website.
*Please note, all orders of this book will be posted as soon as stock arrives in our office - we estimate around July 2024. If you are buying other titles at the same time - including other pre-orders - and would like these posted straight away, it’s best to order them separately, otherwise they will all be processed together!
Joan Aiken (1924–2004) was the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Conrad Aiken, and started writing aged five. She published over 100 books for children and adults, including the acclaimed Wolves of Willoughby Chase, twelve book series and several highly regarded sequels to Jane Austen novels. She worked with illustrators such as Quentin Blake on her Arabel and Mortimer series, and Jan Pienkowski for A Necklace of Raindrops, and her work has been adapted for film and television too. She won many awards during her lifetime, including the Lewis Carroll prize and the Edgar Alan Poe Award, and also received an MBE from Queen Elizabeth II for her services to Children’s Literature. Joan Aiken continues to be recognised as a consummate storyteller, and one of the best-loved authors of the 20th century. Find all her books at www.joanaiken.com
Kiran Millwood Hargrave grew up dreaming of owning her own necklace of raindrops. She is now the Sunday Times bestselling author of ten novels for children and adults, including The Girl of Ink & Stars, Julia and the Shark, The Mercies, and In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen. Her books have won the overall Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year, the Wainwright Prize, a Betty Trask Award, the Prix Rive Gauche à Paris, Blackwells Children’s Book of the Year and been long- or shortlisted for the Carnegie, Foyles Book of the Year, Costa Book Awards, the Blue Peter Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Prix Femina. Her stories have been translated into over thirty languages and optioned for stage and screen. She lives between a river and a forest with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
Annabel Pearl was born in Liverpool and studied Fine Art at Newcastle University, Central Saint Martins, and Wimbledon College of Art. Known for using a variety of media including photography, her art practice explores the role that objects play in social relationships. A set of Dover's cyanotypes were recently acquired by the Imperial War Museum, and also feature in the art historian Carol Mavor's Blue Mythologies. Her debut novel, Florilegia, was published in 2021. She has created joyful illustrations for companies such as Floris, Hermes, Laduree, Pentreath and Hall, Kettles Yard, Lulu Guinness and Claridges, among many others.
