Rosemary Sutcliff with GREAT covers

With the popularity of all sorts of fantasy fiction that's got history/histories/imagined worlds' histories in it, Rosemary Sutcliff's novels are ones I'd love to be promoting to my kids. But the only copies in the library right now are older ones, with older covers, and harder to promote. One tries, but one mostly gets that glazed look...

So I was jubilant to find this blog entry, and will be getting my fabulous independent bookseller to track down these editions. Go and read the blog entry at Rosemary Sutcliff: an appreciation and see more eyecatching covers and the titles that have been or will be reissued (I borrowed the image above from them, and suspect it probably originally came from Amazon).

Warrior Scarlet is a particular Rosemary Sutcliff favourite of mine, but I know that the cover on my own 1970s paperback edition just wouldn't cut the mustard with kids now. Not the prose, which is as muscular and engaging and unsentimental as ever it was: it's the cover designs, which can and have dated. But how many kids would at the very least pick up that new cover for Mark of the Horse Lord? More than a few, I'd guess (partly because they'd either like to meet or be the cover model!).