The Kingdom of Carbonel

When night falls, Cat Country comes to life: the town walls are its roads, and the roofs and treetops its fields and mountains. The regal black cat Carbonel and his consort, Queen Blandamour, are the kind overseers of this magical place, where humans are scarce, cats rule, and the rivers flow with fresh cream. But Grisana, a beautiful gray Persian who makes Lady Macbeth look like the kitten who lost its mittens, has plans to take over Cat Countryand Carbonel and his children, Prince Calidor and Princess Pergamond, are all that stand between her and the throne. Luckily, Carbonel can count on his human friends Rosemary and John, familiar to readers from the fi rst Carbonel book, to band together with the good cats of Cat Country to stand up to Grisana's crew, a nasty bunch that includes Carbonel's old foe, the retired witch Mrs. Cantrip (who seems to have a bit of magic dust left over, mind you), and her bumbling witch apprentice, Miss Dibdin.

Barbara Sleigh (1906—1982) is the author of Carbonel: The King of The Cats (The New York Review Children’s Collection, 2004) and its two sequels, The Kingdom of Carbonel and Carbonel and Calidor (to be published by The New York Review Children’s Collection in 2010). She worked for the BBC’s Children’s Hour.

Besides being a well-known illustrator of children’s books, Richard Kennedy (1910—1989) worked in oils and watercolors. He went to work for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their embryonic Hogarth Press in 1926, at the age of sixteen, and was propelled into Bloomsbury life. He is the author of A Boy at Hogarth Press, an illustrated diary of his years there.