The Witches, first published in 1983, is wonderfully illustrated throughout by Quentin Blake. A young boy and his grandmother uncover a plot by The Witches to get rid of every single child on earth.
One child a week is fifty-two a year. Squish them and squiggle them and make them disappear. This is a story about REAL WITCHES. Real witches dress in ordinary clothes, have ordinary jobs and look very much like ordinary people. But they are far from ORDINARY . . .
The Grand High Witch, leader of all the witches, has a plan to make each and every child disappear. That is, unless one boy and his grandmother can stop her . . .
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A true genius...Roald Dahl is my hero - David Walliams
Author
About Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl was born in Wales of Norwegian parents – the child of a second marriage. His father and elder sister died when Roald was just three. His mother was left to raise two stepchildren and her own four children. Roald was her only son.
He had an unhappy time at school - at Llandaff Cathedral School, at St Peter’s prep school in Weston-super-Mare and then at Repton in Derbyshire.
Dahl’s unhappy time at school was to influence his writing greatly. He once said that what distinguished him from most other children’s writers was “this business of remembering what it was like to be young”. Roald’s childhood and schooldays are the subject of his autobiography Boy.
Since Roald Dahl’s death, his books have more than maintained their popularity. Total sales of the UK editions are around 37 million, with more than 1 million copies sold every year! Sales have grown particularly strongly in America where Dahl books are now achieving the bestselling status that curiously proved elusive during the author’s lifetime.
