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Puffin Book Of Ghosts & Ghouls

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Get ready for Halloween with these terrifying tales. . . Have you checked under your bed? Made sure there's nothing hiding in your wardrobe? Good. Then you should be safe to read this book... Settle down for the 14 ghostly stories lurking behind the glow in the dark cover... Enter the terrifying world of the supernatural and meet an unnerving array of ghosts and ghouls, including a Victorian child with disturbing powers, two children with a gruesome plan, and a bizarre ghost puppy. These shuddering short stories come from highly acclaimed authors, Gene Kemp Joan Aiken Penelope Lively Michael Morpurgo Ray Bradbury Are you brave enough to make it through all 14 stories?

336 pages, Paperback

Published September 6, 2018

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About the author

Gene Kemp

52 books11 followers
Gene Kemp was an English author known for children's books. Her first, The Pride of Tamworth Pig, appeared in 1972. She won the British Carnegie Medal for her school novel The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977).

Gene Kemp was born in Wigginton, Staffordshire in 1926. She grew up near Tamworth, Staffordshire, and went to Exeter University. She became a teacher and taught at St Sidwell's School in Exeter in the 1970s.

From 1972 she wrote stories for young readers about a pig named Tamworth, named after the town she grew up in. Kemp found inspiration for many of the characters in her books amongst the friends of her children, Chantal and Richard.

Her best known book is The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, published by Faber's Children's Books in 1977. Set in the fictional Cricklepit School, it charts the pleasures and pains of friendship and growing up. There are several Cricklepit books, including Snaggletooth's Mystery, an alternative history of the school, and Gowie Corby Plays Chicken, set one year after The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler and referencing Tyke in several chapters.

Kemp wrote ghost stories and fantasy as well as realistic fiction, like Seriously Weird, which is told from the perspective of the sister of a young man with Asperger syndrome. She also dramatised some of her work, the most successful and well-known of these being Charlie Lewis Plays for Time, another Cricklepit story.

Gene Kemp was awarded an Honorary MA from Exeter University in 1984. She lived in Exeter and had three children – a daughter, Judith, from her first marriage to Norman Pattison, which ended in divorce, and another daughter, Chantal, and a son, Richard, from her second marriage, to Allan Kemp, who died in 1990. She had three grandchildren and two great-grandsons. Kemp died at the age of 88 on 4 January 2015.

Kemp won two awards for The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1997): the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, for the year's best children's book by a British subject, and one from the Children's Rights Workshop.

She made the Smarties Prize shortlist four times, in (1981) for The Clock Tower Ghost, (1985) for Charlie Lewis Plays for Time, (1986) for Juniper and (1990) for Just Ferret.

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71 reviews
June 5, 2022
I read three stories and they weren't the best, but I'll read it again one day
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