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Pushkin Press children's editor Simon Mason will launch a children's series, True Adventures, based on real-life historical adventures in Autumn 2020.
The middle-grade series will launch with Bandit’s Daughter by Mason, and illustrated by Amerigo Pinelli, and The Girl Who Said No to the Nazis by Haydn Kaye in Autumn 2020 and quickly follow up with other titles.
The titles will be published in paperback and priced at £6.99 each, featuring original illustrations, timelines, maps and glossaries.
The former m.d. of David Fickling Books moved to Pushkin in February and has been pursing the passion project to bring stories from world history to readers aged 8-12.
"There are so many ways to do history, from series like Horrible Histories, surveys, focusing on kings and queens, fun facts, picture books, that it struck me that the best way is through stories," said Mason. "As soon as we start telling a story then we are hooked and it's about telling the stories of a whole host of new heroes from round the world doing extraordinary things."
Bandit's Daughter will tell the tale of how Mu Guiying, the daughter of a fugitive bandit in eleventh-century China, saved China from the northern horsemen while The Girl Who Said No to the Nazis tells how Munich University student Sophie Scholl took on Hitler at the height of the Second World War in Nazi Germany.
Mason told The Bookseller: "This series will focus on the exciting bits, incidents, episodes in the life of these extraordinary people, whether it is a rescue, a voyage of discovery, to provide a gateway to history, The main objective is to delight and entertain by taking stories that have the added buzz of 'wow, that really happened'."
Other titles in the series include The Flag Never Touched the Ground, about how the men of the 54th Massachusetts regiment, the all-black regiment in the American Civil War, won the hearts and minds of Americans during the Civil War, and The Strange Case of Dr Barry by Lisa Williamson, which tells the story of how Dr James Barry, "the distinguished army surgeon who ran the healthcare service in colonial South Africa, performed the world’s first successful modern Caesarian operation and fought a duel, turned out to be a woman."
The series also has an international focus, said Mason. "I’m particularly excited that we are presenting stories from so many exciting different places. It feels like the world’s series. As a species, we share these stories of human experience, whether they come from China, Jamaica, South Africa, Japan, the US, Germany or wherever. And we think that readers round the world will feel the same way."
Mason, who has hand-picked the authors in the series, added: "It’s been a huge adventure for me personally, engaging with these amazing stories, and working with authors who share my instincts and have the ability to bring the characters and episodes to life. Pushkin, with their tradition of bringing the world’s stories to the UK, are of course the perfect publisher to be developing the series, and I’m loving working with the people here."