A new adventure series about the pivotal moments of discovery through the ages, bringing the past to life with a generous helping of fantasy, humour and delightful, black and white illustrations. Shaman by name and shaman by nature... Billy just hasn't found his magic yet... but he is learning fast. No one is more surprised than Billy when he wakes up on a Chinese battlefield. Scooped from the jaws of death by a boy called Han, Billy's far from rescued. Taking refuge in the royal stables, the boys are soon held hostage by the Emperor Wu. He's at war with the Horse King whose powerful and magical herd of horses, the heavenly horses of Ferghana, he wants for his own. It takes all Billy's skills and a very special spirit horse to get Han to safety and Billy back to his friend Charles Darwin, a two-hundred-year-old talking tortoise. Join Billy, a new kind of explorer who sets out to return artefacts to their original home.

A new adventure series about the pivotal moments of discovery through the ages, bringing the past to life with a generous helping of fantasy, humour and delightful, black and white illustrations. Shaman by name and shaman by nature – Billy just hasn't found his magic ... yet. His selfish, globetrotting parents abandon him for yet another summer in Charles Darwin's strange, museum-like house, where Billy stumbles across a 200-year-old giant talking tortoise named Charles Darwin, by the famous man himself. Charles D, the tortoise, knows every inch of the house and every artefact in it, and he's keen to help Billy realise his powers and set him on the path to adventure. A beautifully carved Inuit ivory necklace is the first object that whisks him back in time to the shrieking chaos of an Arctic blizzard to meet its rightful owner, a girl called Ahnah, her shape-shifting grandmother and the mysterious explorer Pytheas.

Arthur Ransome was, from 1930 to the early 1960s, what J.K. Rowling is today: author of a series of children's books which shaped the imagination of a generation. Rooted in the heyday of the British Empire, Swallows and Amazons and its sequels described a nostalgic Utopia. Yet before that, Arthur Ransome was famous for different reasons. Between 1917 and 1924, as Russian correspondent for the Daily News and Manchester Guardian, he was an uncritical apologist for the Bolshevik regime, with unique access to the revolutionary leaders. As the Red Army engaged with an Allied invasion of Russia, Ransome was conducting a love affair with Evgenia Shelepina, private secretary to Leon Trotsky, then Soviet Commissar for War. As the intimate friend of Karl Radek, the Bolshevik Chief of Propaganda, he denied the Red Terror and compared Lenin to Oliver Cromwell. No English journalist was considered more controversial, or more damaging to British security. At Whitehall, he was accused of being the paid agent of a hostile power and only narrowly escaped prosecution for treason. This is a fascinating, often chilling revision of an English icon through the most formative decade of the twentieth century.

One girl. One turtle. One epic voyage! If you like Pippi Longstocking, you'll love Nelly Peabody. When Nelly says she's going to do a thing, she does it, whatever it is. Learn to juggle china cups? Of course! Live on lemons for a month? Why not? Set out in a boat with knitted sails to find her long-lost father, with only her turtle Columbus for company? Absolutely! And she won't let anything get in her way . . .

Sometimes secrets are hidden in the most obvious places. When Nelly returns home to discover that her mother has mysteriously disappeared, she vows to stop at nothing until she's found her. Climb to the tops of the clouds in a laundry basket? Why not? Dive to the depths of the ocean in an oversized tin can? Of course! Leave her turtle, Columbus, behind? CERTAINLY NOT! He's her best friend, what an awful suggestion. Together they will find the answers! An original, quirky adventure story, beautifully written, packed with eccentric characters, and illustrated throughout in two colour. If you like Pippi Longstocking, you'll love Nelly Peabody.