Break of Dark

by Robert Westall

Published 1 January 1900
If there is a barrier that separates the dark unknown from the everyday world around us? If so, is it broken sometimes by the dead returning, by the undead, or by alien creatures? What else could account for the chance meeting (or was it?) between a young student and hitch-hiker who turns out to be so much stranger than she seems? Why else should three successive crews flying a Second World War bomber Blackham's Wimpey - be driven to madness, despair, even to death, though the plane returns from each mission without a scratch? Who are Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou; the figments of Peter's imagination that become a real life nightmare for Roger and Biddy? There is St. Austin Friars, too: a church without a congregation - until a burial service, oddly arranged a month ahead, is attended by a sinister assortment of the living and the dead. And Sergeant Nice, an ordinary policeman in an ordinary seaside town faced with a series of quite extraordinary thefts; the work surely, of no human hand...

Kingdom by the Sea

by Robert Westall

Published July 1990
During World War II twelve-year-old Harry and a stray dog travel through war-torn England in search of safety.