Joan Aiken

Joan Delano Aiken MBE (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer specializing in supernatural fiction and children's alternate history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognizing the year's best children's book by a British subject. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.

Wolves Chronicles

The Wolves Chronicles vary in length from less than 150 pages to more than 250 pages.^[7] Here the novels are listed in narrative order, and their central characters.

Main series

• The Whispering Mountain (1968), a prequel to the series
• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (featuring Bonnie Green, Sylvia Green and Simon) (1962)^[13]
• Black Hearts in Battersea (featuring Dido Twite and Simon) (1964)
• Nightbirds on Nantucket (Dido Twite) (1966)
• The Stolen Lake (Dido Twite) (1981)
• Limbo Lodge (U.S. title: Dangerous Games) (Dido Twite) (1999)
• The Cuckoo Tree (Dido Twite) (1971)
• Dido and Pa (featuring Dido and Is Twite) (1986)
• Is (U.S. title: Is Underground) (Is Twite) (1992)
• Cold Shoulder Road (Is Twite) (1995)
• Midwinter Nightingale (featuring Dido Twite and Simon) (2003)
• The Witch of Clatteringshaws (featuring Dido Twite and Simon) (2005)

Related novels:

• Midnight Is a Place (1976)

This novel evidently takes place in the same fictional world as the series. Blastburn, the fictional setting of this work, features as the location of Mrs. Brisket's orphanage in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but does not otherwise bring elements of the other books. Its setting and time period resemble and satirise the height of the Victorian manufacturing years, rather than the Georgian setting of the other books. "Joan Aiken follows all the conventions of Dickensian fiction with just a little extra to satisfy jaded contemporary tastes. The Grimsby mansion at Midnight Court houses not one, but two unjustly disinherited orphans ...".