![]() ![]() There was a film a few years ago, that may have boosted sales of the reprints, but I don’t know anyone today who reads them, except the people flocking to join Robert Macfarlane and Julia Bird’s Midwinter reading group (#TheDarkisRising #TheDarkisReading), scheduled to begin on 20th December, which is when the Dark came rising in the eponymous second novel. The sequence captured the imagination of a generation of children, now aged fifty-something, but the books were by no means universally known: barely any of my friends knew about them. In the 1960s and 1970s when the five individual novels first came out – my editions are the slim 1980s Puffins with tight leading and a small font size, about a quarter the thickness of today’s fashion for fat paperbacks – they were simply children’s fiction, marketed alongside Nina Bawden, Roald Dahl and Stig of the Dump. If published today they would be classified as children’s / YA fantasy fiction. About 18 months ago I wrote about Susan Cooper’s five-novel sequence called The Dark Is Rising. ![]()
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