

Run out and buy Sally Gardner’s The Red Necklace. If there’s a better way to make kids realise how thrilling history can be (in this case, the French Revolution), it’s not one I know about.”Meg Rosoff
With its reversals, surprises, scholarship and dramatic details of an era so soaked in blood that the Seine ran red, The Silver Blade is historical fiction at its height. No reader, old or young, could resist its passion, told in crystalline prose and peopled with characters as engaging as the dwarf Tetu, bear-like Didier and the venal Mr Tull. It is by far the best British book for children I have read this year.”Amanda Craig, The Times


Yann and Sido fall in love – but then she’s kidnapped, and he needs all his courage and skill to rescue her a second time. Even then the young lovers are not safe, for our hero learns who he really is… The horrors of the French Revolution make a dazzlingly vivid setting for a tale of high adventure. The Red Necklace, complete in itself, leaves the reader longing to know what happened next – and The Silver Blade concludes Yann and Sido’s dramatic story.