Pigeon Post is the sixth book in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, published in 1936. It won the first Carnegie Medal awarded for children's literature. This book is one of the few Swallows and Amazons books that does not feature sailing. All the action takes place on and under the fells surrounding the Lake. Ransome made use of the mining and prospecting knowledge and experience of his friend, Oscar Gnosspelius, who features in the book as a character known as Squashy Hat.
We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea is the seventh book in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. It was published in 1937. In this book, the Swallows (Walker family) are the only recurring characters. They are staying in a new location, Pin Mill on the River Orwell upstream from the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich.
The book features a small sailing cutter, the Goblin, which is almost identical to Ransome's own boat Nancy Blackett. This book also features accurate geography unlike the Lakes books. Ransome sailed Nancy Blackett across to Flushing by the same route as part of his research for the book.
Lanark, subtitled A Life in Four Books, is the first novel of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray. Written over a period of almost thirty years, it combines realist and dystopian fantasy depictions of his home city of Glasgow. Its publication in 1981 prompted Anthony Burgess to call Gray "the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott". The book, still his best known, has since won the Saltire Society Book of the Year and David Niven awards, and has become a cult classic. In 2008, The Guardian heralded Lanark as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction."
Heaven is a 1985 novel by V. C. Andrews. It is the first of the five books in her Casteel series. Along with Dark Angel, it is one of the two books in the series published during her life. Of all the folks in the mountain shacks, the Casteels were the lowest — the scum of the hills. Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest, smartest girl in the backwoods, despite her ragged clothes and dirty face...despite a father meaner than ten vipers...despite her weary stepmother, who worked her like a mule. For her brother Tom and the little ones, Heaven clung to her pride and her hopes.
Inevitably, Sides's main focus is the virtual decimation of the Navajo nation from the 1820s to the late 1860s. Sides depicts the complex role of whites in the subjugation of the Navajos through his portrait of Kit Carson—an illiterate trapper, soldier and scout who knew the Native Americans intimately, married two of them and, without blinking, participated in the Indians' slaughter. Books about Carson have been numerous, but Sides is better than most Carson biographers in setting his exploits against a larger backdrop: the unstoppable idea of manifest destiny.
