The Complete Bostock and Harris [Hardcover]

A New York Review Children's Collection Original

The Complete Bostock and Harriscombines two delightful, suspenseful, and madly funny tales about two boys in eighteenth-century England, clever and mischievous Harris and sweet but not-so-bright Bostock, who in spite of their differences are the best of friends. 

In “The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris,” the wily pair put their classical education to the test when they adopt the Spartan custom of exposing infants to the wild, leaving Harris’s infant sister, Adelaide, to the elements. The boys imagine a wolf will come to nourish her, but their plan backfires. 

It is springtime in “The Night of the Comet,” and in the days before Pigott’s comet will pass over their town, Harris’s and Bostock’s thoughts turn to love: Bostock swoons over Harris’s sister Mary; Harris longs for Captain Bostock’s telescope. The boys strike a deal: Bostock will make off with the telescope in exchange for Harris’s “expert” wooing advice. Unfortunately, that expertise is not quite what Bostock would have hoped.“It’s a fine thing that Leon Garfield’s rip-roaring and funny tales should be brought back into circulation for a new generation.” —Joan Aiken

“As an extravagant admirer for more than twenty-five years, it is hard for me to believe that Leon Garfield needs any introduction . . . He has given us books written clearly, vividly, truthfully and with great regard for language. But it is their outlaw quality that will both draw the young reader into the tale and, just possibly, impel him or her to new understandings of self, others, and the hypocrisy of the status quo.” —Katherine Paterson, author ofBridge to Terabithia, inThe Horn Book Magazine

“I am tempted to say that Garfield’s stories are the tallest, the deepest, the wildest, tl³.