Nina Bawden Books In Order

Plato Jones Books In Order

  1. The Real Plato Jones (1993)
  2. The Outside Child (1989)

Novels

  1. Who Calls the Tune (1953)
  2. The Odd Flamingo (1954)
  3. Change Here for Babylon (1955)
  4. The Solitary Child (1956)
  5. Devil by the Sea (1957)
  6. Just Like a Lady (1960)
  7. In Honour Bound (1961)
  8. The Secret Passage (1963)
  9. Tortoise by Candlelight (1963)
  10. On the Run (1964)
  11. Under the Skin (1964)
  12. A Little Love a Little Learning (1966)
  13. The White Horse Gang (1966)
  14. The Witch’s Daughter (1966)
  15. A Handful of Thieves (1967)
  16. A Woman of My Age (1967)
  17. A Grain of Truth (1968)
  18. The Runaway Summer (1969)
  19. Squib (1971)
  20. The Birds on the Trees (1972)
  21. Anna Apparent (1972)
  22. Carrie’s War (1973)
  23. George Beneath a Paper Moon (1974)
  24. The Peppermint Pig (1975)
  25. Afternoon of a Good Woman (1976)
  26. Rebel on a Rock (1978)
  27. Familiar Passions (1979)
  28. The Robbers (1979)
  29. Walking Naked (1981)
  30. William Tell (1981)
  31. Kept in the Dark (1982)
  32. The Ice House (1983)
  33. The Finding (1985)
  34. On the Edge (1985)
  35. Princess Alice (1985)
  36. Circles of Deceit (1987)
  37. Henry (1988)
  38. Keeping Henry (1988)
  39. Family Money (1991)
  40. The House of Secrets (1992)
  41. Humbug (1992)
  42. Granny the Pag (1995)
  43. Welcome to Tangier (1996)
  44. A Nice Change (1997)
  45. Off the Road (1998)
  46. Ruffian on the Stair (2001)

Picture Books

  1. Saint Francis of Assisi (1983)

Non fiction

  1. In My Own Time (1994)
  2. Dear Austen (2005)

Plato Jones Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Picture Books Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Nina Bawden Books Overview

The Real Plato Jones

Plato Jones is half Greek, half Welsh. He does not feel he really belongs anywhere, something he shares with his best friend. However, he finds that his heritage may not be the handicap he always imagined it to be. Shortlisted for the WH Smith Mind Boggling Books Award.

The Outside Child

Thirteen year old Jane, whose quiet life with her two aunts is interrupted by sporadic visits from her seafaring father, tries to learn more about her half brother and sister after discovering that her father remarried ten years ago.

Devil by the Sea

The first time the children saw the Devil, he was sitting next to them in the second row of deck chairs in the bandstand. He was biting his nails. So begins the horrifying story of a madman loose in a small seaside town his prey the very young and the very old. Seen through the eyes of Hilary a precocious, highly imaginative, and lonely child it is a chilling story about the perceptiveness of children, the blindness of parents, and the allure of strangers. As the adults carry on with their own grown up antics, Hilary is led further and further into the twilight world of one man’s terrifyingly distorted view of normal life. But will she have the sense to resist it?

On the Run

Ben, eleven years old and the youngest of the Mallory children, has left his aunt and siblings to come to London where his widower father wishes to introduce him to his young future step mother. Unable to return home when his brother and sister become ill, Ben is left on his own to explore the maze of walled gardens which surround his new home. Soon he meets Thomas, the son of an exiled East African Prime Minister, and Lil, a fatherless cockney waif. All three children, troubled and contending with the dislocation of their new lives, become entwined in each others’ journeys of self discovery and adventure. In Nina Bawden’s much praised second novel for young readers, the lessons and pains of childhood are evinced with characteristic deftness, combining sympathy, affection and timeless wit.

A Little Love a Little Learning

By the author of ‘Circles of Deceit’ and ‘Tortoise by Candlelight’, this novel shows the fragility of a family’s equilibrium. Three children live with their mother and are happy in the love of their stepfather. The arrival of an aunt and the adolescent worries of the girls sets up tensions.

The Witch’s Daughter

On the Scottish island of Skua, friendship develops between the lonely and mysterious Perdita and a blind girl, Janey. Both possess a kind of second sight Janey’s is the ability to hear, feel and remember more than others, and Perdita’s is the ominous legacy of her being a witch’s daughter. When Janey’s brother, Tom, starts investigating a cluster of mysterious events and suspicious characters, all three become entwined in an adventure of hidden jewels, desperate criminals and dangerous detection. Written in 1963, The Witch’s Daughter showcases Nina Bawden’s innate regard for the integrity of her young characters. As she has said: ‘I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.’ Hugely admired on publication by both reviewers and readers, it was described as ‘thrilling’ by the Times Literary Supplement.

A Woman of My Age

An exploration of the expectations, betrayals and deceptions within marriage in this story of a couple, eighteen years married, who take a holiday journey through Morocco, the woman coming to a new realisation of her own feelings. Originally published in 1973.

A Grain of Truth

Emma’s anxious and manipulative plea, ‘Someone listen to me’, opens and closes this deliciously uncomfortable novel in which Nina Bawden explores myriad emotional disguises with her characteristic acuity. When Emma’s father in law falls down the stairs to his death, she is convinced she pushed him in an act of wish fulfilment. To her husband Henry and her close friend Holly, this is unthinkable. Guilt is simply Emma’s obsession in a humdrum domestic existence enlivened by romantic fantasy. For Holly, who successfully fields a string of love affairs, sexual pleasures are more easily attainable, whereas Henry, a Divorce lawyer, prides himself on being a realist. Each tells their story in turn, illuminating and distorting their separate versions of the truth. As they do so, an intricate jigsaw of the private deceits with which they shore up everyday life emerges.

Squib

Kate finds herself drawn into the mystery surrounding Squib an ill treated, scared little boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to her brother, drowned in a swimming accident years earlier.

The Birds on the Trees

The expulsion from school of their eldest son shatters the middle class secutiry of Maggie, a writer, and Charlie, a journalist. Since childhood, Toby has been diffident and self absorbed, but the threat of drug taking and his refusal or inability to discuss his evident unhappiness, disturbs them sufficiently to seek professional help. Veering between private agony and public cheerfulness, Maggie and Charlie struggle to support their son and cope with the reactions and advice of friends and relatives. Noted for the acuity with which she reaches into the heart of relationships, Nina Bawden here excels in revealing the painful, intimate truths of a family in crisis. Toby’s situation is explored with great tenderness, while Maggie’s grief and self recrimination are rigorously, if compassionately, observed. It is a novel that raises fundamental questions about parents and their children, and offers tentative hope but no tidy solutions.

Anna Apparent

Who is Anna? Is she Anna May Gates, the war time evacuee who encounters neglect and unwitting abuse on a Welsh farm? The reticent, dutiful daughter of her foster mother, Crystal? Giles’s shy child bride? Conscientious mother and housewife? Or Daniel’s undemanding but sophisticated mistress? It takes catastrophe for Anna to emerge as an individual, claiming her own identity. Nina Bawden, as ever both acute and generous, delves skilfully into character and offers the richly textured story of a woman’s life and stratagems, and of the flawed, kindly people who surround her.

Carrie’s War

One of a series of top quality fiction for schools. Carrie and her brother Nick are evacuated to a Welsh mountain village in 1939, and become closely involved with several memorable characters.

The Peppermint Pig

Johnnie was only the runt of the litter, a little peppermint pig. He’d cost Mother a shilling, but somehow his great naughtiness and cleverness kept Poll and Theo cheerful, even though it was one of the most difficult years of their lives.

Afternoon of a Good Woman

‘Today, Tuesday, the day that Penelope has chosen to leave her husband, is the first really warm day of spring…
‘ Penelope has always done her best to be a good wife, a good mistress, a good mother and a good magistrate. Today she is more conscious that usual of the thinness of the thread that distinguishes good from bad, the law abiding from the criminal. Sitting in court, hearing a short, sad case of indecent exposure and a long, confused theft, she finds herself examining her own sex life how would all that sound in court? her own actions and intentions while she observes the defendants in the dock. This novel is a tour de force , an ingeniously constructed novel in which Nina Bawden counterpoints public appearance with private behaviour in her hero*ine, Penelope. The result is a marvellous picture of a not always admirable but engagingly complex and very human hero*ine. As always, Bawden offers a compelling story, sharply witty and beautifully observed. But it is also an honest and provocative book tracing the divergent courses of morality and justice, and uncomfortably posing, as Penelope does of herself, the question: who and what is a good woman?

Familiar Passions

On their 30th anniversary, James calmly announces that he wishes to leave Bridie. An adopted child, Bridie stepped into marriage at the age of 19, and has nurtured two step children and a daughter. The habit of protecting others is strong in Bridie, but with her happiness shattered, she is uncertain of her identity. Unless she claims a portion of her past, Bridie fears that she will have no future…

Walking Naked

Laura is happily married, a mother, and a successful novelist. Although prey to night terrors, she is adept at smoothing the disorder of reality into controlled prose. Interweaving memory, conversation, and reflection, Walking Naked telescopes the whole of Laura’s life-childhood, marriages, triumphs, and disappointments-into a day in which the past and the present converge. It begins with a game of tennis played for duty rather than amuseme*nt and progresses, via an afternoon party of old friends and jaded emotions, to a bewildering visit to Laura’s son, who is imprisoned on a drugs charge. At its close, the possibility of death within the family brings unresolved conflicts to center stage, and Laura strips herself of the posturing and self-deceit with which she has cloaked her vulnerability. Continually surprising, witty, and often disquieting, this is one of Nina Bawden’s most impressive novels.

Kept in the Dark

One of a series of top quality fiction for schools, this is an emotional thriller about what happens to three children staying with their grandparents when their mysterious and frightening cousin David arrives.

Circles of Deceit

Circles of Deceit is narrated by a painter who specializes as a copyist. Major figures on the canvas are Clio, his child bride; Helen, his first wife; and his mother Maisie. They confound lies and the truth in a subtle weave, while the silent agony of the painter’s son is a poignant reflection on the busy web of deception. And as the copyist transcribes his modern versions of Old Masters, so the past keeps breaking through the surface of the present, until fact and fiction, like art and life, meet in a remarkable conclusion.

Family Money

Fanny Pye’s London house, bought for a song many years earlier, is now worth a small fortune. When she intervenes in a street brawl and is hospitalized, her children tactfully suggest that she move to the suburbs, coincidently releasing some useful ‘Family Money.’ Fanny has different views about inheritance and property, and is far more concerned that she cannot properly remember the events of that night which ended in the death of a stranger. Then, as her amnesia clears, she is overwhelmed by a terrible sense of danger.

Humbug

Cora, William and Alice are going to stay with their grandparents while their parents are on holiday. But Granny is in hospital and three children are too much for Grandpa to look after by himself, so Cora is sent next door to stay with Angelica. But Cora hates Angelica. And Angelica hates Cora.

Granny the Pag

Granny the Pag biker, psychiatrist and chain smoker is a powerful person, but a social embarrassment. However, when Catriona’s relationship with her Gran is threatened, Catriona fights for the right to choose where she lives and with who, and she chooses Granny the Pag.

A Nice Change

Amy thinks that the Hotel Parthenon in Greece would be A Nice Change for her husband, Labour Minister Tom Jones, who is grumpily recovering from an operation for hemorrhoids. But once there, they run into Portia, Tom’s redheaded ex mistress. Then they receive a surprise visit from Tom s rakish father, Vic. Also at the hotel are Philip, an American publisher recovering from his wife s suicide; Prudence, a young doctor nursing a broken heart and waiting for her Granny; and Mr. and Mrs. Boot, who have decided it best to steer clear of the London police for a little while. Completing the cast are the elegant, gray haired twins, Jane and Trish. Reminiscent of A Midsummer s Night Dream, where the most unlikely people fall in and out of love, A Nice Change is classic Nina Bawden.

Off the Road

When Tom’s grandfather goes Off the Road, Tom is sure Gandy has gone mad. Tom knows that beyond the wall lies the Outside, a wild place filled with barbarians and unimaginable dangers. He also knows that Oldies are weak minded. So Tom summons all his courage and goes after Gandy, who obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing. Or does he? Tom’s experience in the strange, messy, emotional world Outside, where so many things prohibited to Insiders are taken for granted, quickly shakes all his certainties. Who is crazy, the Oldies who are sent to the Memory Theme Park, or the families who let them go? Is the Wall meant to keep the Outsiders out, as Tom has always been told or the Insiders in? Master storyteller Nina Bawden, known for stories in which secrets from the past emerge in the present, has created a spellbinding adventure set in a future society with secrets that make it a chilling mirror of our own.

Ruffian on the Stair

In six days, Silas Mudd will celebrate his 100th birthday. He is alarmingly healthy and tough as old boots which is more than can be said of his son Will. Not sure he ll make old bones, Silas confides loudly to Coral, his daughter in law. But there is no doubt that Silas’s son and his two daughters will be at the party. Best outfits and good form are what they think Silas wants served up, and they dare not disappoint him. This is not a family that reveals disturbing thoughts or truths. But Silas is the only one left who knows exactly what is shoring up his family. So he sits, waiting and thinking, wondering what would happen if he were to tell.

Dear Austen

Accidents happen to other people. But on On May 10th 2002, Nina Bawden discovered what it feels like to be one of those other people. It was to be a lovely outing to Cambridge for a friend’s birthday party. Nina Bawden and her husband Austen Kark boarded the 12:45 from Kings Cross and settled down with their books and papers. A few minutes later the train derailed. Seven people were killed and 76 badly hurt. Nina Bawden was gravely injured and Austen was killed instantly. In this powerful and poignant letter to her husband, Nina Bawden uses her considerable writing skills to try and make sense of it all. She explains how she now in her late 70s found herself the outspoken spokesperson for the survivors of the crash, interviewed here and abroad, and even one of the characters portrayed in David Hare s The Permanent Way. Although liability has finally been admitted, as of October 2004, there has been no resolution to this tragedy, nor a public enquiry into how it happened.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment