Aidan Chambers Books In Order

Dance Sequence Books In Order

  1. Breaktime (1978)
  2. Dance on My Grave (1982)
  3. Now I Know (1987)
  4. The Toll Bridge (1992)
  5. Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999)
  6. This Is All (2005)

Novels

  1. Cycle Smash (1967)
  2. Marle (1968)
  3. Fighters in the Sky (1976)
  4. Men At War (1977)
  5. Ghost Carnival (1977)
  6. Snake River (1977)
  7. Escapers (1978)
  8. Animal Fair (1979)
  9. Seal Secret (1980)
  10. Loving You Loving Me (1980)
  11. The Present Takers (1983)
  12. A Quiver of Ghosts (1987)
  13. This Place Is Haunted (1990)
  14. Driving Down to Galilee (2008)
  15. Dying to Know You (2012)
  16. Blindside (2015)

Omnibus

  1. More Cool School Stories (1999)

Collections

  1. Funny Folk (1978)
  2. A Haunt of Ghosts (1987)
  3. The Kissing Game (2011)
  4. Dead Trouble (2020)

Plays

  1. Johnny Salter (1966)
  2. The Car (1967)
  3. The Chicken Run (1968)
  4. Dream Cage (1982)
  5. Only Once (1998)

Picture Books

  1. Don’t Forget Charlie and the Vase (1971)
  2. Mac and Lugs (1971)
  3. Fox Tricks (1981)

Anthologies edited

  1. World Zero Minus (1971)
  2. I Want to Get Out (1971)
  3. Ghosts That Haunt You (1980)
  4. Ghost After Ghost (1982)
  5. Out of Time (1984)
  6. Shades of Dark (1984)
  7. A Sporting Chance (1985)
  8. Love All (1988)
  9. On the Edge (1990)
  10. Favorite Ghost Stories (2002)
  11. More Ghost Stories (2004)
  12. Haunted Stories (2005)

Non fiction

  1. Ghosts (1969)
  2. The Reluctant Reader (1969)
  3. Haunted Houses (1971)
  4. Ghosts 2 (1972)
  5. More Haunted Houses (1973)
  6. Book of Ghosts and Hauntings (1973)
  7. Introducing Books to Children (1973)
  8. Great British Ghosts (1974)
  9. Great Ghosts of the World (1974)
  10. Flyers and Flying (1976)
  11. Book of Cops and Robbers (1977)
  12. Book Talk (1985)
  13. Once upon a Time… (1986)
  14. The Reading Environment (1991)
  15. Great Ghosts (1991)
  16. Tell Me (1993)
  17. Reading Talk (2001)

Dance Sequence Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Picture Books Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Aidan Chambers Books Overview

Breaktime

The first two novels in Printz winner Aidan Chambers’s Dance Sequence are at last available in a fresh format that will draw teens to these classics of YA literature. Literature is crap. Fiction is, anyway. A pretense. Ersatz…
. When you read a story you are pretending a lie. Morgan What begins as a game for Ditto the refutation of his friend Morgan s Charges Against Literature quickly escalates into a multilevel challenge. After Ditto s father suffers a heart attack in the middle of one of their fights, Ditto decides he has to get away for a few days to sort out his life. His chronicle of his experiences becomes his rebuttal to Morgan s Charges. But is this thought provoking examination of people and ideas all fact…
or fiction? Aidan Chambers leaves it up to the reader to decide in this novel that Publishers Weekly calls excruciatingly funny as well as touching. Includes a new afterword from the author! Praise for Aidan ChambersMichael L. Printz Award winnerCarnegie Medal winnerHans Christian Andersen Award winner

Dance on My Grave

Amulet Books is the home of Aidan Chambers, one of young adult literature’s greatest living writers. With profound respect for readers, Chambers again stretches the YA genre to its edges and beyond…
. Ambitious, imperfect, challenging, and powerfully affecting. Kirkus Reviews, starred review In this revelatory, groundbreaking novel, the love of sixteen year old Hal Robinson for self confident Barry Gorman is revealed through Hal s own observations, press clippings, and the scattered notes of a social worker. These various perspectives contribute to an extraordinarily sensitive portrait of the intensity of first love. The Horn Book writes, The author is marvelously gifted at suggesting the ecstasy and insecurity that accompany new love including its emotional and physical, social and spiritual aspects. A major strength of the book, the central conflict hinges not on the lovers being gay, but on their having two idiosyncratic and contradictory personalities.

Now I Know

Now I Know is all at once a compelling meditation on faith and religion and the difference between the two and an intense love story. When a body is found hanging from a crane in a scrapyard, Tom sets out to investigate this strange case. Nik embarks on a research mission for a film about a contemporary life of Jesus. Then there’s Julie, a girl bandaged from head to toe and laid up in a hospital bed. These three simultaneous plots presented through a combination of letters, prose, poetry, jotted notes, flashbacks, and puzzles are woven together into a provocative novel of mystery and self discovery. Like the other books in The Dance Sequence, Now I Know can be read alone or as part of the series.

The Toll Bridge

To escape the pressures of suffocating parents and a possessive girlfriend, seventeen year old Piers takes a job as a keeper of a toll bridge and its cottage. There he befriends Adam, a charismatic wayfarer who shows up one day and refuses to leave. He also befriends a girl named Tess, and soon he and Tess find themselves strangely attracted to Adam and falling under his spell. The three test their sexuality and the bonds of their friendship as they discover who they are and aren t in a harrowing course of events that leaves all three wondering if you can ever really know anyone.

Like the other books in The Dance Sequence, The Toll Bridge can be read alone or as part of the series.

Postcards from No Man’s Land

Seventeen year old Jacob Todd is about to discover himself. Jacob’s plan is to go to Amsterdam to honor his grandfather who died during World War II. He expects to go, set flowers on his grandfather’s tombstone, and explore the city. But nothing goes as planned. Jacob isn’t prepared for love&150or to face questions about his sexuality. Most of all, he isn’t prepared to hear what Geertrui, the woman who nursed his grandfather during the war, has to say about their relationship. Geertrui was always known as Jacob’s grandfather’s kind and generous nurse. But it seems that in the midst of terrible danger, Geertrui and Jacob’s grandfather’s time together blossomed into something more than a girl caring for a wounded soldier. And like Jacob, Geertrui was not prepared. Geertrui and Jacob live worlds apart, but their voices blend together to tell one story&150a story that transcends time and place and war. By turns moving, vulnerable, and thrilling, this extraordinary novel takes the reader on a memorable voyage of discovery.

This Is All

Described by the author as an adult novel for teenagers and a teenage novel for adults, This Is All is a richly entertaining and challenging read. This Is All is a self portrait of a passionate girl from the time she is 15 until she is 20, written by the now pregnant Cordelia who plans to give the story of her teenage years to her daughter on her 16th birthday. She wants to include all kinds of things she wrote as a young woman as well as the episodes and thoughts she has now as she compiles her book. Cordelia models her book on the famous Japanese journal, The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon. She tells the story of her mother who died when Cordelia was 3, of her father and her aunt Doris who marry when she is 16, of her love for William Blacklin, the boy with whom she first has sex and with whom she falls deeply in love. She writes about her spiritual teacher, and describes her love affair with an older married man, and her terrifying sexual experience with an unbalanced young man who is obsessed with her. Her book includes thoughts on being a woman, on poetry, music, reading and writing, on being pregnant and finally, of her marriage to William. It is, by turns, funny, poignant, sad and exciting, and ironic and truthful about topics that parents often do not discuss with their children. Aidan Chambers’s provocative and challenging novels for teenagers and young adults have won him international acclaim. This Is All is the sixth and final book in a loosely connected sequence of novels that began with Breaktime in 1978.

More Cool School Stories

The first of these three stories is about problems caused by the most feared boy in the school; in the second, something inside the school computer is threatening a spine chilling disaster; and in the third, Lucy is forced to take on the school bullies once and for all.

Favorite Ghost Stories

Following in the ghoulish shadow of Ghost Stories, the top selling Story Library title, this new anthology is sure to chill and thrill with 15 of Aidan Chambers’ Favorite Ghost Stories. Offering spine chilling tales from the highest caliber authors including Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie, and Robert Westall, the soon to be spooked will no doubt find this a perfectly haunting introduction to different genres of ghost story, and a compelling read that few will dare put down.

More Ghost Stories

Including masterpieces such as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and Agatha Christie’s ‘The Lamp,’ this eerie anthology of fifteen stories is not for the faint of heart.

Tell Me

There is a correlation between the richness of the reading environment in which readers live and the richness of their talk about what they’ve read. In any group of children we find that if they begin by sharing their most obvious observations they soon accumulate a body of understanding that reveals the heart of a text and its meanings for them all. Talking about a book helps a child find the heart of a story, make sense of a string of facts, and understand complicated ideas. Aidan Chambers proposes an approach for discussing books so children learn to talk well about what they’ve read. Indeed, not only talk well, but listen well. And not just about books, but about other things. For the Tell Me approach ultimately helps children learn to clarify ideas for themselves and to communicate with others. It is, in short, a basic step in applying knowledge and articulating meaning. Tell Me offers practical information about book talking in the classroom, explaining some of the processes and outlining the ground rules developed by teachers and others who work with children and books. From their experience he has formulated a Framework, a repertoire of questions that assist readers in speaking out their reading. Tell Me is companion to The Reading Environment.

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