Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

'Psychologically, the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did.'

George Orwell

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes.

A summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella.

The sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor.

These form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip's life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman.

Dickens's haunting late novel depicts Pip's education and development through adversity as he discovers thetrue nature of his 'great expectations'!

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812. He enjoyed his first commercial success with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, swiftly followed by the serialization of Oliver Twist a year later. By the publication of The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841, Dickens was internationally famous. Great Expectations was first published in serial form in All the Year Round magazine between 1860 and 1861. His novels, many now adapted for TV and film, continue to entertain readers all over the world.

In December the BBC will show a major new adaptation, forming part of their celebration of Dickens and the bicentenary of his birth in 2012.

I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill

'themes of persecution, punishment and the exploitation of the weak' The Guardian

This extraordinary, evocative novel boils over with the terrors of childhood and won the Somerset Maugham Award.


‘I didn’t want you to come here.’ So says the note that the boy Edmund Hooper passes to Charles Kingshaw when he arrives with his mother to live at the Hooper's isolated country house, Warings. To Hooper, Kingshaw is an intruder, a boy to be subtly persecuted, and Kingshaw finds that even the most ordinary object can be turned by Hooper into a source of terror. Kingshaw knows Hooper will never let him be. Kingshaw cannot win, not in the last resort. He knows it, and so does Hooper. And the worst is still to come…


Susan Hill writes: "I went to stay in a remote farm cottage behind a wood in the summer of 1968 to write another book. While I was there, the farmer’s grandson and a friend were staying and often came by my cottage chatting and sometimes fighting – and the story emerged from there, though the real boys were not at all like Hooper and Kingshaw. The episode of the Crow really happened - to me, Hang Wood really existed, the farm and the village and Warings were all as I described them.

The book has had an extraordinary impact – some adults cannot take it because they do not believe young boys can behave in this way but plenty of young people have told me that this sort of cruelty and unkindness is common - it’s what we call bullying and it goes on more and more, of course. Although I wrote it as an adult novel, as a result of being set for GCSE for many years it has become one that young people read and usually find a lot in it to think about and discuss. "