It is 1880, in the Opera House in Paris. Everybody is talking about the Phantom of the Opera, the ghost that lives somewhere under the Opera House. The Phantom is a man in black clothes. He is a body without a head, he is a head without a body. He has a yellow face, he has no nose, he has black holes for eyes. Everybody is afraid of the Phantom - the singers, the dancers, the directors, the stage workers ...But who has actually seen him?
Marilla Cuthbert and her brother Matthew want to adopt an orphan, to help on the farm at Green Gables. They ask for a boy, but they get Anne, who has red hair and freckles, and who talks and talks and talks. They didn't want a girl, but how can they send a child back, like an unwanted parcel? So Anne stays, and begins a new life in the sleepy, quiet village of Avonlea in Canada. But it is not so quiet after Anne comes to live there ...
The President is dead! A man is running in the night. He is afraid and needs to rest. But there are people behind him - people with lights, and dogs, and guns. A man is standing in front of a desk. His boss is very angry, and the man is tired and needs to sleep. But first he must find the other man, and bring him back - dead or alive. Two men: the hunter and the hunted. Which will win and which will lose? Long live the President!
Sarah Harland is nineteen, and she is in prison. At the airport, they find heroin in her bag. So, now she is waiting to go to court. If the court decides that it was her heroin, then she must die. She says she did not do it. But if she did not, who did? Only two people can help Sarah: her mother, and an old boyfriend who does not love her now. Can they work together? Can they find the real criminal before it is too late?
When a large plane is hijacked, the Prime Minister looks at the list of passengers and suddenly becomes very, very frightened. There is a name on the list that the Prime Minister knows very well - too well. There is someone on that plane who will soon be dead - if the hijackers can find out who he is! And there isn't much time. One man lies dead on the runway. In a few minutes the hijackers will use their guns again. And the Prime Minister knows who they are going to kill.
When men find gold in the frozen north of Canada, they need dogs - big, strong dogs to pull the sledges on the long journeys to and from the gold mines. Buck is stolen from his home in the south and sold as a sledge-dog. He has to learn a new way of life - how to work in harness, how to stay alive in the ice and the snow ...and how to fight. Because when a dog falls down in a fight, he never gets up again.
'I turned on the light, but there was nobody there. Then I saw something in the corner that made my blood turn cold. Scudder was lying on his back. There was a long knife through his heart, pinning him to the floor.' Soon Richard Hannay is running for his life across the hills of Scotland. The police are chasing him for a murder he did not do, and another, more dangerous enemy is chasing him as well - the mysterious 'Black Stone'. Who are these people? And why do they want Hannay dead?
When Black Beauty is trained to carry a rider on his back, or to pull a carriage behind him, he finds it hard at first. But he is lucky - his first home is a good one, where his owners are kind people, who would never be cruel to a horse. But in the nineteenth century many people were cruel to their horses, whipping them and beating them, and using them like machines until they dropped dead. Black Beauty soon finds this out, and as he describes his life, he has many terrible stories to tell.
'Suddenly, there was a high voice screaming in the darkness: 'Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!' It was Long John Silver's parrot, Captain Flint! I turned to run ...' But young Jim Hawkins does not escape from the pirates this time. Will he and his friends find the treasure before the pirates do? Will they escape from the island, and sail back to England with a ship full of gold?
London in the 1830s was no place to be if you were a hungry ten-year-old boy, an orphan without friends or family, with no home to go to, and only a penny in your pocket to buy a piece of bread. But Oliver Twist finds some friends - Fagin, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates. They give him food and shelter, and play games with him, but it is not until some days later that Oliver finds out what kind of friends they are and what kind of 'games' they play ...
The empty centre of Australia. The sun is hot and there are not many people. And when Bill meets a man, alone, standing on an empty road a long way from anywhere, he is surprised and worried. And Bill is right to be worried. Because there is something strange about the man he meets. Very strange ...
When Christmas comes for the four March girls, there is no money for expensive presents and they give away their Christmas breakfast to a poor family. But there are no happier girls in America than Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. They miss their father, of course, who is away at the Civil War, but they try hard to be good so that he will be proud of his 'little women' when he comes home. This heart-warming story of family life has been popular for more than a hundred years.
