A typical day in the life of a single dad, who wakes like a great big bear and then turns into a whirly, twirly octopus as he tries to brush his little girl’s hair, make breakfast, pack a school lunch, tie her shoelaces and send a text. Then he chitter, chatters and monkeys about and makes her very, VERY late for school. Turn the pages to find out all dad’s playful mishaps and guess the animal he will become until by the end of the day, he is a ‘gallumping, bellowing’ monster chasing her through the house, getting everything tidied...

A lost of city of gold … anacondas more than 30 feet long … jaguars lurking in the dark … and a frog so poisonous, a single drop of its toxin will kill up to twenty people. Oliver Strange travels with his friend Zinzi to the heart of the Colombian forest, to help his father search for this endangered but highly poisonous frog – Phyllobates terrribilis. They meet a mysterious boy called Fabio and come face to face with brutal guerrilla fighters. These are the forests of Colombia where drug traffickers grow their coca to turn into cocaine. The stakes are...

A modern day pirate story set in Madagascar with high action…  clues found in notebooks, strange maps, a bizarre laboratory, a girl held captive and heavily-armed gangs controlled by men intent on squeezing the life out of the land. When Oliver accompanies his father to live in a tree-house in Madagascar to research the endangered Golden Mantella frogs, he finds there are more than frogs, lemurs, leeches and giant boas lurking deep in the forests. The dark secrets of Madagascar go back to pirate days. A story that slowly unfolds into breathless drama as Oliver and his friend, Zinzi, try to rescue...

Oliver’s father disappears while collecting frog data in the Okavango Swamps and Oliver travels from London to find him. Things go from bad to worse when he meets a girl who keeps a pet python and then lands up in the wild amongst crooks with a very sinister goal. He soon discovers maps and a Swiss Army knife are not enough when faced with crocodiles, hippos, lions and dynamite-brandishing crooks who are intent on collecting toxin from the most poisonous frog of them all… the Golden Dart frog found only in Colombia. ‘It’s not called Phyllobates terriblilis for nothing! It...

  The best gift I ever received as a child was a box of Faber Castell coloured pencil crayons from my father. It was a tin box and if you pressed the back corners the lid popped open to reveal a layer of crinkly tissue paper and 24 crayons each sharpened to perfection, laid out in a rainbow that gave me my first introduction to names like rose madder, cadmium yellow, burnt ochre, raw umber and burnt sienna… the last two long before I’d ever heard of the colours of Italian earth. They all had numbers and were faceted with...