Black Beauty

Anna Sewell was born in 1820 into a Quaker family whose respect for horses was out of step with the common view of the time, that animals should be worked until they dropped. Disabled in a fall aged 14, Anna lived all her life with her parents but became an expert carriage driver and, as editor and stern critic, helped her mother, Mary Wright Sewell, become a successful author of evangelical children's books. Anna wrote Black Beauty, her only book, in the last years of her life, as a plea for more humane treatment of horses. She died in 1878, a year after the novel was published to wide acclaim.John, Lauren StLauren St John grew up surrounded by horses, cats, dogs and a pet giraffe on a farm and game reserve in Zimbabwe, Africa, the inspiration for her bestselling White Giraffe series. At seventeen, she spent a year working in the UK as a veterinary nurse before becoming a sports and music journalist. Dead Man's Cove, the first in her Laura Marlin Mysteries series, won the 2011 Blue Peter Book of the Year Award. She is also the author of the Kat Wolfe series. A passionate conservationist, Lauren is an ambassador for the Born Free Foundation and founder of the Authors4Oceans anti-plastics campaign. When not writing or rescuing leopards, she is a full-time valet to her not-in-the-least-demanding Bengal cat, Max.

Laced with generous doses of moral virtue . . . Black Beauty has more integrity and decency than the average human Justine Hankins, the Guardian