Silas Marner

‘It’s a woman. She’s dead, I think – dead in the snow at the Stone-pits – not far from my door.’ Since his arrival in the small village of Raveloe, Silas Marner has been an outsider. Nobody knows where he came from, nobody understands him, nobody dares to invite him in. All of this changes when a little girl wanders through his door one snowy night. What feelings will she stir in Silas’s lonely heart? How will she draw Silas closer to the heart of Raveloe? If Raveloe has a heart, it also has a head in the form of the wealthy Cass family. When Dunstan Cass enters Silas’s life, he takes something valuable. Years later, will Godfrey Cass do the same and take away what Silas has grown to love most dearly?

Real Reads are accessible texts designed to support the literacy development of primary and lower secondary age children while introducing them to the riches of our international literary heritage. Each book is a retelling of a work of great literature from one of the world’s greatest cultures, fitted into a 64-page book, making classic stories, dramas and histories available to intelligent young readers as a bridge to the full texts, to language students wanting access to other cultures, and to adult readers who are unlikely ever to read the original versions.

GEORGE ELIOT was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), one of Victorian England’s pre-eminent writers of both fiction and non-fiction and translator.

SARAH WIMPERIS began painting at a very early age as a result of family influences and an inability to spell. She studied fine art at Falmouth School of Art, exhibited with the Portal Gallery, then travelled the world, including China, Russia, Israel and Norway, painting all the way. She returned to Cornwall, raised a lot of children, painted murals for a while, then became a professional illustrator. Since 2008 she has exhibited regularly at the Beside the Wave Gallery in Falmouth, which she now manages.

GILL TAVNER was an English Teacher and Head of Department before turning to writing when she had young children of her own. She has also taught English in South East Asia, worked as a personal trainer, been a management trainee in an insurance company, led treks in Africa, run her own business and painted fake tattoos on Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Perhaps it is this variety that makes her such a versatile writer.