E Nesbit & Lois Lowry 
The Wouldbegoods 

The Bastable children are up to yet more adventures in this sequel to The Story of the Treasure Seekers – a delightful classic that will charm children and adults alike. The Bastable children have been banished to the country in disgrace – following a particularly damaging re-enaction of a jungle scene featuring expensive stuffed animals and a garden hose. In this sequel to E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, itself published by Hesperus Minor in 2013 with a foreword by Julia Donaldson, the gang of six, Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel and Horace Octavius (H.O.), decides to turn over a new leaf. Spurred on by Dora’s urgings, the children found ‘The Society of the Wouldbegoods’ – aiming to mend their ways by being good whenever possible. But the schemes they undertake to try to be good and make themselves useful never seem to quite go to plan. Even when they are attempting to be well behaved, they seem unable to endear themselves to adults, instead, amongst other things, they cause a fire, some flooding, get held hostage and find time to purchase a pistol along the way. It seems that despite their best intentions, they are destined to leave a trail of destruction in their wake – and to be, well, frankly, naughty. ‘E. Nesbit remembered exactly what it felt like to be a child’ Jacqueline Wilson ‘I devoured all the stories about the enterprising Bastable children… Many years later I read the stories to my youngest son. He was immediately hooked, drawn in as his mother and grandmother (and possibly his great-grandmother) had been’ Julia Donaldson ‘We always looked forward, my son and I, to finding out what the Bastables would get up to next… A crafty writer, was Edith Nesbit’ Guardian