At age five-and-a-half, Matilda is “knocking off double-digit multiplication problems and blitz-reading Dickens. Even more remarkably, her classmates love her even though she’s a super-nerd and the teacher’s pet”. But everything is not perfect in Matilda’s world. | For starters she has “two of the most idiotic, self-centered parents who ever lived. Then there’s the large, busty nightmare of a school principal, Miss (‘The’) Trunchbull, a former hammer-throwing champion who flings children at will, and is approximately as sympathetic as a bulldozer. Fortunately for Matilda, she has the inner resources to deal with such annoyances: astonishing intelligence, saintly patience, and an innate predilection for revenge”.

This is a book series following the four Alden siblings who make home in a boxcar.

Carlie knows she’s got no say in what happens to her. She is in a foster home with two other kids, Harvey and Thomas J, and is just a “pinball being bounced from bumper to bumper. As soon as [she] get settled, somebody puts another coin in the machine and off [she goes] again. But against her will and her better judgment, Carlie and the boys become friends. And all three of them start to see that they can take control of their own lives”.

Little orphan Heidi goes to live high in the Alps with her gruff grandfather and brings happiness to all who know her on the mountain. When Heidi goes to Frankfurt to work in a wealthy household, she dreams of returning to the mountains and meadows, her friend Peter, and her beloved grandfather.

Oliver Twist is an orphan who ran away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble. Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull’s Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.