Saunderstown

by David Osborn

Author David Osborn wrote Saunderstown as a memoir of his childhood summers with his brother and best friend ninety-five years ago while at his grandmother’s home on Narragansett Bay. With the sole restraint of respect for adults as well as prompt appearance at meals, and with little or no rules as to where they went and what they did, the bay was theirs and an endless source of adventure, some of it pretty hairy-scary. Adventures over, it was the magic of Grandma’s ancient horse and buggy–days barn, and make-believe war with Grandpa’s great opposing armies of lead soldiers lined up on the outdoor paddock dirt and grass between flanking box stalls occupied by silently watching horses. Then, at summer’s end, it was riding and the unrestrained joy of racing those same horses down a long mile of completely empty white sandy beach.

Jessica and the Witch’s Broom

by David Osborn

📚 book 3 in The Jessica Books series

On yet another exciting adventure in Fairyland, now to rescue little Prince Benjamin, heir to the throne of the land of No but held hostage by the evil sorceress Lady Citronella, Jessica teams up with old friends: Greta, the fairy princess often disguised as a witch, and Sir Percival, the doughty monocled Englishman who fantasizes hunting hares with his trusty gun. Flying them about is Greta’s irrepressible witch’s broom, Sweepy, who saves the day while all the time thinking he’s the old fashioned Wabash Cannonball train made famous in country-western music.

Selected praise:

“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”

—New South Wales Register

“Adventure enough to keep kids spellbound …”

—Yorkshire Post

“Osborn manages to make you love a crocodile …”

—Warwickshire Dispatch

Jessica and the Golden Swan Feather

by David Osborn

📚 book 5 in The Jessica Books series

Using a medieval wishing charm to escape from a big city museum where she is mistakenly locked in for the night, Jessica, along with Annie-Mae, a homeless Rag Doll, ends up not at home but in OR, where the country’s evil Great Leader holds the charm hostage until brought a feather from a deified Golden Swan in Hoppitland, country of the Stick people. With a brief welcoming respite among friendly rats in their the canyon country of Rodentia, then a perilous trip across a great man-eating Vine Forest, Jessica brings a golden feather back to OR where, after Annie-Mae chooses to return to Rodentia, she uses the medieval charm, first in a heads-on defiant showdown with the all-powerful Great Leader of OR, then to wish herself safely back home.

Selected praise:

“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”

—New South Wales Register

“Adventure enough to keep kids spellbound …”

—Yorkshire Post

Jessica and the Flying Unicorns

by David Osborn

📚 book 4 in The Jessica Books series

Love for a poor old plow horse sees Jessica on an exciting new adventure when pitted against malicious wheels-for-legs Wheelies, Mesozoic-era Pterodactyls, deadly stone Gargoyles, and enthroned as a Goddess Queen by fun-loving Pixies. Join her until, with Beak, a wise know-everything hummingbird, Junk Dog, an itinerant peddler, and Dinky, an exuberant little Unicorn, she wins ultimate victory over Esmeralda, the ageless evil-scientist leader of a band of mercilessly militant girls the same age as Jessica herself.

Selected praise:

“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”

—New South Wales Register

“Adventure enough to keep kids spellbound …”

—Yorkshire Post

Jessica and Her Adventures in Fairyland

by David Osborn

📚 book 2 in The Jessica Books series

Fiery dragons, witches, goblins, and wizards don’t stop Jessica, a little girl who lives with her mother in the poorest part of a great city, from endless adventuring in the magic of Fairyland and other faraway places.

Join her and enchanting fairyland friends in five thrilling stories. In one she overcomes pirates and ogres to defeat an evil sorceress, and in another defies monster spirits and faces down a wicked witch to free a fairy princess from savage goblins.

Be with her in a lovely fairyland refuge saving long-forgotten toys from a terrible fate, and yet again when in a battle of wits, she defeats an all-powerful wizard to restore a lost dragon child to its mother. Don’t miss a final adventure in which, ever undaunted, she braves killer trees, bedouin robbers, and a fearful yeti tyrant to rescue old fairyland friends from imminent peril in the circus of a cruel and merciless clown.

Selected praise:

“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”

—New South Wales Register

“adventure enough to keep kids spellbound …”

—Yorkshire Post

“Osborn manages to make you love a crocodile …”

—Warwickshire Dispatch

Alicia’s Secret

by David Osborn

Meet three remarkable women who excelled in times when men dominated everything.

Alicia, a young American girl in England, visits an old churchyard and evokes Elvira, a sprightly, mischievous young ghost who in turn introduces her to three women from three critical moments in history, when each triumphed in a male-dominated society.

Considered the greatest English queen, Matilda of Flanders came from Normandy with William the Conqueror as the key strategist for the Conquest as well as his guiding light in the politics and culture of her era. Sofonisba Anguissola was an accomplished Renaissance artist who studied with Michelangelo and became his protégé and collaborator, and Lucie Dillon, once a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette at Versailles, barely escaped the Terror and the dreaded guillotine to farm in the new United States for a time before returning to France to advise and aid Napoleon. In their own words, these ghostly women describe their widely different lives and loves, and the three periods in which they lived—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution.

Selected praise:

“As commercial and exciting a novel as can be found today.… It is shocking, savage, and graphic, a cruel book that spares little in detail. There is unbearable suspense, headlong action, and ends with a final ironic twist that will leave the reader gasping. Osborn is a master storyteller and his remorseless style matches his remorseless narrative.…”

—Abilene Reporter News, reviewing David Osborn’s Open Season

“An exciting, highly plausible Washington thriller …”

—Gore Vidal, reviewing David Osborn’s The French Decision

“No better example of absorbing, fast-paced intrigue. Compelling to the last punctuation mark.”

—Clive Cussler, reviewing David Osborn’s The French Decision

“This is a first-class book. It has what one admires so often in English thrillers and finds so seldom in American ones: literate, accomplished writing which makes the plot more ingenious, the characterizations more deft and engaging, and therefore the thrills more thrilling.…”

—Michael Thomas, author of Green Monday, reviewing David Osborn’s Love and Treason

“Breathless introduction to the inner workings of big business …”

—The Times Literary Supplement, reviewing David Osborn’s The Glass Tower

“This well-plotted thriller makes compulsive holiday reading.”

—Salisbury Journal, reviewing David Osborn’s Murder on Martha’s Vineyard

Ophelia and Her Forest Friends

by David Osborn

Ophelia is a little girl who lives deep in a far-off great forest where her widowed father is a woodcutter and her home a tiny cottage with a thatched roof and flower-filled window boxes. Blessed at birth by fairies, she is friends with all the little forest animals who live around her, and with no school or other children to fill her playtimes, she is never lonely, sharing adventures with many, like Sammy Skunk, Rory Raccoon, Oscar Owl, Betsy Bunny, Patrick Porcupine, Benjamin Beaver, and others—all joining with her in keeping their forest home peaceful and safe.