Paradise House

Eleven-year-old Alice is unwanted and unloved, but does not consider herself to be unhappy as she has no experience of happiness to use as a benchmark. Living an isolated life with only an indifferent father and uninterested servants, the future seems lonely and fairly bleak.

But when a rare outing to a race meeting goes badly wrong and Alice's horse bolts, she is thrown together with a local racehorse-training family and, slowly but surely, her life begins to change - and Alice discovers that she is not the girl she thought she was.

Less gritty than many of K M Peyton's other books, Paradise House is an accomplished and well-rounded story with a fairytale feel, ideal for those looking for a 'happy ever after' ending.