#6Degrees - The Jungle Book to... (Guest post by Sarah Forbes)

The #6degrees feature continues today, with Sarah Forbes, author of the Elspeth Hart series posting her six choices. I need to read the Elspeth Hart books ASAP - I've heard great things about Sarah's writing, and they're gorgeously illustrated by James Brown! They're published by Stripes Publishing, with most recent book Elspeth Hart and the Magnificent Rescue being released earlier this month.

Over to you, Sarah!

1. The Jungle Book is by Rudyard Kipling, who spent his early years in India, before being sent to England where was initially miserable. This brings me straight to one of my favourite children’s books, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Nobody does ‘miserable coming from India to England’ like Mary Lennox.

2. Mary in The Secret Garden is an orphan, friendless and unhappy, until she discovers the joys of an overgrown walled garden in the grounds of Misselthwaite Manor…

3. Another orphan who finds magic in a new place is Daniel, the hero of Ross Mackenzie’s The Nowhere Emporium. (I’m a teeny bit biased as I bought this book for Floris when I was editing there, but Ross is a super writer. Seek it out!)

4. The magical world of performance and ‘freaks’ leads me straight to Wild Boy by Rob Lloyd Jones, set in the dark underworld of Victorian London. (I also LOVE the cover art for this book. Quick high-five to the design team at Walker!)

5. Keeping with the dark and mysterious, but moving on to an adult novel: I recommend Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger – a creepy gothic novel set in the 1940s, in a rambling, once-great house. (I’m a sucker for a book set in a rambling, once-great house.)

6. And from one sinister big house to another, and my final stop: I leave you with the stunning debut novel by Jenni Fagan, The Panopticon. It’s about a teenage girl in a young offenders’ institution, and it’s gritty and tough and brilliant. Not for the faint-hearted, but probably one of the finest debut novels I’ve ever read.

Have you done a #6Degrees post this month? Remember to link it up to my post from April 2nd!