Alan Garner Books in Order

Staying near Alderley Edge, Susan and Colin discover that a family bracelet is actually a lost jewel guarded by ancient forces. Goblins, witches, dwarves, and the wizard Cadellin pull them into a classic quest across hill, wood, and mine.

Colin and Susan are drawn back into the wild powers around Alderley Edge when Susan's bracelet, and Susan herself, become tied to older magic. The sequel is stranger and darker than Weirdstone, with the Wild Hunt close behind.

Four children from Manchester step through a ruined church into a fading other world and are asked to guard its treasures. When that danger follows them home, the ordinary city becomes the battleground.

In a Welsh valley, three teenagers find strange flower patterns that seem to wake an old story of love, jealousy, and violence. Garner turns myth into a tense modern haunting, with class and family pressure tightening every scene.

Three stories, Roman Britain, the English Civil War, and the modern day, circle the same Cheshire landscape and the same stone axe head. This is one of Garner's most intense books, about love, violence, time, and minds under strain.

What starts as a rough children's game becomes a sharp story about play, humiliation, and the thin line between fun and bullying. Garner catches the moods of the playground with unusual seriousness.

Garner gathers fool and trickster tales from many traditions and groups them by the changing shapes of the fool figure. It is a lively, wide-ranging collection for readers who like folklore with bite and mischief.

Mary asks her stonemason father for a book and is led instead into the deeper meanings of stone, craft, and family memory. It is a tiny story with enormous depth, rooted in work, place, and what can be read without words.

On his last day of school, Joseph has to decide whether he will follow the family stonemasons or choose a different craft. The story is quiet but tense, built around work, class, and one boy's first real act of independence.

Set in the war years, this final Stone Book story follows a winter day shaped by family memory, village life, and the shadow of conflict overhead. Garner makes ordinary sights carry the force of an ending and a beginning at once.

Robert spends a harvest day among men cutting corn the old way, watching work, skill, and family ties take shape around him. In a very small space, Garner shows how a child begins to see the weight of a trade and a place.

Four richly colored fairy tales make up this illustrated collection, each built around transformations, pursuit, danger, and luck. These are compact storybook adventures, but they still carry the old fairy-tale sense that anything can change in a moment.

A young girl caught in danger has to rely on courage, quick thinking, and a little magic to stay ahead of pursuit. Garner gives the old chase-tale pattern speed and clarity, with just enough wonder to keep it glinting.

After a strange gift changes a poor family's luck, two brothers born under a golden sign are pulled into adventure, jealousy, and enchantment. Garner tells it as a compact fairy tale where fortune can turn as quickly as a spell.

This short collection reworks five tales from the Gaelic layers of British folklore. The stories are rough-edged, funny, eerie, and sometimes baffling, which is part of the point: Garner lets them keep their old strangeness.

A princess secretly weds a stableboy, and a golden-maned horse becomes the key to escape when power turns cruel. Garner retells the tale as a fast-moving chase story, full of disguises, peril, and quick-witted survival.

Garner selects and retells fairy tales from across Britain, keeping their odd turns, hard bargains, and flashes of dark humor. It is a strong gateway into the older story world that shaped so much of his fiction.

This collection brings together English and Welsh folk tales full of trickery, magic, sharp endings, and country wit. Garner tells them plainly but musically, so the stories still feel like something heard rather than polished.

Garner's version keeps the famous bargain, the climb into the clouds, and the giant's treasure, but tells them with a leaner, older folk-tale feel. It is a brisk retelling that remembers the story's danger as well as its fun.

Three nursery tales sit inside this picture book, each simple on the surface and a little odd underneath. Garner gives familiar story shapes fresh rhythm, making them feel old, alive, and ready to be told aloud.

Loosely based on William Buckley, this novel follows a Cheshire laborer whose visions and troubles lead from England to transportation in Australia and life among Aboriginal people. It is part historical fiction, part spiritual journey, and very much a book about exile.

Garner retells the old barnyard story with his usual clean, rhythmic touch. A hardworking hen asks for help planting, grinding, and baking, and the answer she gets makes the lesson about labor and fairness land with real force.

When a firebird starts stealing golden apples, Prince Jack sets out to catch the thief and finds a sharp-toothed ally in Grey Wolf. Garner reshapes a Russian folktale into a swift quest full of bargains, escapes, and reversals.

This collection gathers Garner's essays and lectures on writing, myth, language, education, and his own life. It is the best place to hear him think on the page, sometimes bluntly, sometimes movingly, always with precision.

A brother and sister set out through a fairy-tale landscape after a witch sends the boy on impossible errands. Garner keeps the story spare and dreamlike as danger, cunning, and luck carry them toward the well of the title.

In a Pennine valley, an old inscription about a death on the moor links an eighteenth-century porter with a modern man drawn to the same harsh ground. Garner turns landscape, folklore, and survival into a tough, haunting mystery.

This later volume gathers Garner's retellings into one place, offering a broad run of British folk tales in his spare, exact voice. It is a great sampler of the stories, themes, and speech patterns behind the rest of his work.

Garner's memoir returns to his wartime childhood on Alderley Edge, with village school, illness, family talk, and the arrival of American soldiers. It is less a straight chronology than a vivid map of the place that fed his fiction.

Colin from the Alderley books is now an adult astronomer near Jodrell Bank, living with gaps in his memory and the ache of a missing sister. As therapy and deep history start to meet, the old legends of the Edge return in a darker form.

Young Joe Coppock, stuck at home with a weak eye and his comics, strikes an odd bargain with a rag-and-bone man. What follows is a brief, strange fable about seeing differently and stepping sideways out of ordinary time.