When Sheba’s new friend Tillgoes missing, the group discover she’s not the first child to be snatched from the banks of the Thames but the police aren’t interested in looking for poor mudlarks. However, this kind-hearted girl is taken under the wing of her fellow freak show attractions and soon gets drawn into the murky underworld of London where she discovers that the great capital city is definitely not paved with gold.Īt night people pay to gawp and sneer but the quirks that make society shun the Peculiars, also makes them excellent at crime-fighting. Along with Flossy, the two-headed lamb, she is sold to Plumpscuttle and taken from the only world she remembers, a cage in a rundown shack on the end of the rickety Little Pilchton pier. We are introduced to the group through the eyes of Sheba, an eight-year girl old who believes she was abandoned by her parents because she bears more than a passing resemblance to a wolf. Set around a gothic sideshow called Plumpscuttle’s Peculiars it follows a lovable group of misfits including Sister Moon, an ex-assassin who can move at the speed of light and is deadly with a blade, Monkey Boy, ace climber and human stink bomb, Mama Rat and her performing rats, and Gigantus, the man-mountain who is also an aspiring romance novelist. Especially if that alley is a mucky, smelly alley in the middle of smog filledVictorian London where sinister secrets and menacing men lurk in the shadows. Terms and Conditions can be found on the Chicken House website.If you love history, mystery and adventure, then this winner of the Times Children’s Fiction competition will be right up your alley. In 2019 a second prize was introduced to mark the competition's tenth anniversary, with a publishing contract worth £7,500 awarded to the Chairman's Choice. The grand prize is a publishing contract worth £10,000. The annual competition is for full manuscripts suitable for readers aged between 7 and 18 by unpublished, unagented writers. The Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition was launched in 2008 by Chicken House and The Times newspaper.

The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition It is the UK publisher of the multi-million bestselling Maze Runner series. Leonard, Rachel Grinti, Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Jasbinder Bilan. It has introduced many new successful authors, including Cornelia Funke, Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams, Kevin Brooks, Lucy Christopher, Rachel Ward, M. The Chicken House is a publishing company owned by Scholastic Corporation, specialising in children's fiction.įounded in 2000 by Barry Cunningham and Rachel Hickman as Chicken House Publishing, it was bought by Scholastic in 2005. For the agricultural building, see chicken house.

Freaks by kieran larwood