The House at World's End

Carrie, Tom, Em and Michael Fielding encounter unexpected adventures when they are sent to live with their uncle and aunt after their house burns down. While their father is away and their mother is in hospital, they are left in the care of Uncle Rudolph who is unused to children and decides to let them live at World's End, a ramshackle house which was once an inn. Free at last from interference from their relatives, they begin to add to their already sizeable collection of animals - Carrie rescues John the horse, finds a wounded dog in the hayloft and even tries to save a monkey from a terrible fate... This is the first book in the series about an extraordinary family and the adventures they have at World's End.

Great grand daughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in - she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge - Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939.

Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but the majority of writing continued to be set in Britain. Her book of 1953, No More Meadows, reflected her work with the NSPCC and she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children's books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals, and to some extent children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.