About the books
Celia Rees is the author of seventeen books for young adults, including the award-winning Witch Child and the celebrated Pirates!. Her books have been widely reviewed to great acclaim in the trade press.
Each book has a "buy this book" link – you can get a copy right away! And you can click on each book's cover for more details.
The Fool's Girl
2010, Bloomsbury Violetta and Feste are in London, the year is 1601 and William Shakespeare is enjoying success at the Globe Theatre. But Violetta is not there to admire his plays; she is in England to retrieve her country's greatest treasure, stolen by the evil Malvolio, and she needs help. In an adventure that stretches from the shores of Illyria to the Forest of Arden, romance and danger go hand in hand. In a quest that could mean life or death, can Violetta manage to recover the precious relic and save her country and herself? |
|||||
Blood Sinister
1996, Scholastic Ellen Forrest is sick, she feels as if the life is being sucked out of her. The doctors think that she is suffering from a disease of the blood, and she has been sent to her grandmother's house to rest, but she seems to be getting worse, not better. Can it have anything to do with the diaries she has found in the attic? Diaries written in Victorian times by her great great grandmother. Diaries that describe an encounter with a handsome young Count who comes from the Land Beyond the Forest. Ellen likes a vampire story, who doesn't? The difference is that this one just happens to be true… |
|||||
Sovay
2008, Bloomsbury Sovay begins her life as a highway robber to test her lover, but she is living in dangerous times, full of fear, with the spectre of the Revolution in France reaching across the Channel. Sovay’s father has disappeared, the family are tainted by accusations of treason. Sovay takes to the road in earnest to clear her name and quickly becomes entangled in a terrible web of deceit and duplicity. Can she escape before the net closes in on her and all around her? |
|||||
Pirates!
2002, Bloomsbury The true and remarkable adventures of Minerva Sharpe & Nancy Kington, Female Pyrates. What would make two young women take to the high seas and a life of piracy? Nancy Kington is the daughter of a rich merchant, Minerva Sharpe a slave on her father’s plantation. Divided by birth and fortune, together these two find friendship and break the bounds of gender, race and social position to follow their own destiny. |
Witch Child
2000 1659. A time of fear and persecution. Mary, granddaughter of a witch, keeps a diary. It begins: I am Mary. I am a witch… She sees her grandmother hanged, is rescued by a stranger, takes ship for America and finds a place in a Puritan community there. All that befalls her, she records in her diary and as she writes, she stitches the pages inside a quilt for discovery would mean death. |
Sorceress
2002 The sequel to Witch Child. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award 2002. Over three hundred years separate Agnes Herne from Mary Newbury, but they are linked inextricably by more than blood. Some of Mary’s special powers have come down to Agnes and through her the rest of Mary’s remarkable story can be told. |
|||
The Cunning Man
2001, Point Horror Unleashed Finn is not at all sure about the Salt House. Overlooking the dramatic sweep of Westwater Bay, it brings back all her nightmare fears of drowning, of the ghosts of the dead reaching out for her… And Westwater is dangerous. Countless seafarers have lost their lives there, ships lost, broken on the vicious Viper Rocks, lured by wreckers’ false lights, summoned by the dark enchantments of cunning men – masters of sea or tide. Or so the legends say, but all that was a long time ago. It cannot be happening now. So why does Finn feel such fear? Is it her old terror back again, or something new entirely? |
The Vanished
1997, Point Horror Unleashed There are all kinds of stories about the school, about the city: ghost stories, hauntings, mysterious disappearances. They make entertaining copy for the school newspaper, then Fraser begins to wonder if some of them might be true. |
||||
The Stone Testament
2007, Scholastic As foretold in ancient texts, and marked by the Mayan Long Count, time has nearly run out. Foreshadowed by a sequence of bizarre phenomena and natural disasters, the End Time is fast approaching. Only Abraham Black has the knowledge to stop this from happening, ancient wisdom inherited from those who have gone before him: Edwardian scholar, Aurel Lockwood and American adventurer, Brice Ambrose Stone. With the help of his son, Adam, suicide cult survivor, Zillah, and streetwise Kris, he hopes to outwit the sinister forces ranged against him before it is too late. |
The Wish House
2005 Summer, 1976: Life-changing, heartbreaking, unforgettable. Every year, Richard has taken the same holiday with his parents, in the same part of Wales, meeting up with the same people. But this summer, everything is about to change. |
||||
Earlier titles
- Trap in Time trilogy
- City of Shadows (2002)
- A Trap in Time (2002)
- The Host Rides Out (2002)
- Truth or Dare (2000)
- Soul Taker (1998)
- H.A.U.N.T.S. series (1998)
- H Is for Haunting
- A Is for Apparition
- U Is for Unbeliever
- N Is for Nightmare
- T Is for Terror
- S Is for Shudder
This series was republished in 2002
as the Trap in Time trilogy.
- Ghost Chamber (1997)
- Midnight Hour (1997)
- Colour Her Dead (1994)
- The Bailey Game (1994)
- Every Step You Take (1993)
Short stories
Short stories by Celia appear in the following anthologies:
- Mirrors – ed. Wendy Cooling – Harper Collins Children’s Books
- Heroes & Villains – Anthology – Hodder Children’s Books
- Kids’ Night In – War Child Anthology – Charity Harper Collins Children’s Books
- Silent Night – Anthology – Scholastic Children’s Books
