A beautiful new paperback edition, featuring a delightful new Afterword by Lizza Aiken - Joan Aiken's daughter - on how the story came to be written, plus fascinating material from the author's archive to celebrate the 60th anniversary of this wild, evocative and timeless fantasy. A fast-paced Dickensian adventure set in an alternative 19th Century England - with wolves! In a period of English History that never happened, when Good King James III is on the throne, and the whole country is ravaged by wolves which have migrated through the newly-opened Channel Tunnel. Young orphans Bonnie and Sylvia fall into the hands of evil Miss Slighcarp, they need all their wits - and the help of Simon the goose-boy - to escape unscathed, for the governess is more cruel and merciless than the wolves that surround the great house of Willoughby Chase. Illustrated by Pat Marriot and filled with brilliantly-drawn Dickensian characters The Wolves of Willoughby Chase makes an excellent choice for confident pre-teen readers who like a strong plot and good characterisation. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase often appears on lists of the best books for children such as The Telegraph's Top 100 Best Children's Books and the BBC's 100 Books to Read before You're Fourteen.

ジョーン・エイキンが描く本作の真髄は、架空の十九世紀英国という「もう一つの歴史」が放つ濃密なゴシックの魅力にあります。狼が跳梁跋扈するこの歪んだ世界は、単なる冒険譚を超え、人間の底知れぬ悪意と気高き勇気が衝突する極上の寓話です。エイキンの洗練された筆致は、過酷な冬の美しさと子供たちの強靭な生命力を鮮やかに浮かび上がらせます。 実写版の凍てつく視覚的恐怖に対し、原作は言葉によって読者の想像力を極限まで拡張させます。映像が切り取ったゴシック的な造形美は、テキストの緻密な心理描写と共鳴し、メディアを越えた深い相乗効果を生んでいます。文字から立ち上る荒野の寒気と映像の美学、その両方を享受することで、本作に込められた「野生の輝き」はより一層の深みを増すのです。