Secret Friends

What's the good in keeping secrets?Secret Friends is a heartbreaking story about friendship and bullying from the multi-award-winning Elizabeth Laird. Rafaella doesn't find it easy to make friends. She looks and feels different from the others at school. And Lucy is the first to tease, the first to call her 'Earwig', until they get to know one another and Lucy sees that Rafaella is full of hopes and ideas, just like she is. Lucy loves keeping her own secret friend, until tragedy strikes and secrets can't be kept any longer.Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Children's Book Award and reissued with gorgeous illustrations, more than twenty years after first publication, Elizabeth Laird's moving and unflinching novella brings home the crucial importance of cultivating empathy in young people.'[A] humane and honest story. It conveys so much, so simply and so well' Scotsman'[A] fine weepy with a moral, about the dangers of playground cliquishness and cruelty' The Sunday Times

"[A] fine weepy with a moral, about the dangers of playground cliquishness and cruelty." --Sunday Times, "Humane and honest . . . It conveys so much, so simply and so well." --Scotsman

Elizabeth Laird is the multi-award-winning author of several much-loved children's books, including The Garbage King, Red Sky in the Morning and The Fastest Boy in the World. She has been shortlisted for the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal six times and her novel based on time spent in refugee camps in Jordan, Welcome to Nowhere, was the winner of the UKLA Award. She lives in Britain now, but still likes to travel as much as she can.Alleanna Harris is a US illustrator who has been drawing for as long as she can remember. Alleanna finds inspiration in the beauty in everyday things. She lives in New Jersey.