Nicolette Jones

Go all in for the National Year of Reading 2026 with this inspiring, accessible and powerful collection of words that matter. Featuring a stunning cover and inside illustrations by best-selling illustrator Axel Scheffler and expertly selected extracts with accessible, thoughtful commentary by Nicolette Jones, children's book expert for The Sunday Times. The perfect gift for every occasion. Celebrate the joy of reading with this inspiring collection of poetry, prose, letters, song lyrics, speeches, quotations and more! From Shakespeare to Stephen Hawking; Greta Thunberg to Galileo; Malala to Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Lin-Manuel Miranda to Alfred Lord Tennyson - these are all in turn powerful, funny, moving, wise, and thought-provoking. Previously published in hardback as Writes of Passage

Tansy and her husband Guy are the newest arrivals in Bellinas, a lush oasis tucked into the coast of northern California where a reclusive, creative community is beginning to take shape. Helmed by Guy''s cousin Mia, a famous model-turned-wellness-luminary, and her tech mogul husband, the group renounces the outside world in pursuit of purity, fashioning their own rules about what to eat and how to live. Everything seems perfect in Bellinas: food is abundant, flowers are always in bloom, and nearby wildfires leave the town remarkably unscathed. While Guy is happy in their new lives, Tansy becomes more and more suspicious of the community and increasingly desperate to save her already-fragile marriage. And as lonely women have throughout the ages, she wants to believe in what may only be a beautiful lie. The Witches of Bellinas unfolds as a confession from Tansy, filled with anguish over the life, and sense of self, she''s surrendered in her desperation to belong. In J. Nicole Jones''s clever reimagining of cult power and groupthink, the question isn''t why join, but rather, what happens when you understand the danger, but can''t conceive of a way out?

Raymond Briggs has changed the face of children's picture books, with his innovations of both form and subject. Stylistically versatile, he has illustrated some sixty books, twenty of them with his own text, and first became a household name in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a handful of books - Father Christmas, Fungus the Bogeyman, The Snowman, When the Wind Blows - that were entertaining and subversive and appealed to both children and adults. The refrains of his work are class, family, love and loss. Nevertheless, his default mode of expression is humour. Briggs is always funny, and the balance between this and melancholy is his defining characteristic, though his style ranges from the romantic to the grotesque, from the fanciful to the direct. Encompassing sixty years of Raymond Briggs's work, from political picturebooks to children's classics, this study explores his themes of class, family and loss, and how he demonstrates both emotional power and great technical skill.