The Goose Road
By (Author) Rowena House
Walker Books Ltd
Walker Books Ltd
5th April 2018
United Kingdom
Children
Fiction
823.92
Short-listed for Branford Boase Award 2019 (UK)
Paperback
384
Width 129mm, Height 197mm, Spine 22mm
265g
A debut novel about one girl's remarkable journey across France during WWI.
France 1916. Anglique Lacroix is haymaking when the postman delivers the news: her father is dead, killed on a distant battlefield. She makes herself a promise: the farm will remain exactly the same until her beloved older brother comes home from the Front. "I think of it like a magical spell. If I can stop time, if nothing ever changes, then maybe he wont change either." But a storm ruins the harvest, her mother falls ill and then the requisition appears... In a last-ditch attempt to save the farm from bankruptcy, Anglique embarks on a journey across France with her brother's flock of magnificent Toulouse geese.
An impressive debut with a tenacious heroine. One for slightly older fans of Emma Carrolls historical fiction. * The Bookseller *
House is a wonderful storyteller, combining simple prose with a relish for domestic detail. This is a story that young readers will remember long after GCSE timelines have been forgotten. * Telegraph.co.uk *
House is a wonderful storyteller, combining simple prose with a relish for domestic detail. This is a story that young readers will remember long after GCSE timelines have been forgotten. * The Telegraph *
An enjoyable book that tells a different kind of war story. Young Anglique Lacroix makes a great heroine and her epic journey across France with her geese to save the family farm, is amazing. * Ross, 11, LoveReading *
The Goose Road is now one of my favourite books! It can change your mood in a second! You are happy then suddenly you are almost crying! Its romantic, happy, sad, adventurous.all of my favourite things in one book! * Hope, 11, LoveReading *
Rowena House studied journalism at LSE and spent several years on Fleet Street, reporting for various news agencies. She has lived and worked in France, Africa and Belgium as a Reuter's foreign correspondent and covered the fall of Addis Ababa at the end of Ethiopia's 30-year civil war. She now lives in Devon and works as a freelance journalist. In 2013, Rowena won a competition run by Andersen Press, which published her winning entry, "The Marshalling of Anglique's Geese" in War Girls, a collection of short stories about WWI as seen through the eyes of young women. The Goose Road is her novelization of that story.