A collection of three wonderfully festive stories from Eva Ibbotson, the bestselling author of Journey to the River Sea. With a beautiful cover by Joe Wilson and inside illustrations, The Christmas Star is a wonderful gift to treasure at Christmas and all year round.

In the first story - Vicky and the Christmas Angel - a young Viennese girl discovers, to her horror, who really brings the children's presents at Christmas.

In The Christmas Star a family encounters a fortune teller at the local Christmas market who changes their lives.

The Great Carp Ferdinand is a story about a hero with a difference as it follows the impact that Ferdinand - the carp intended for the Mannhaus family's Christmas dinner - has on the household in the lead-up to Christmas.

Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but when the Nazis came to power her family fled to England and she was sent to boarding school. She became a writer while bringing up her four children, and her bestselling novels have been published around the world. Journey to the River Sea won the Nestlé Gold Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Some of her other young fiction titles include The Secret of Platform 13, Which Witch? and The Great Ghost Rescue. Eva died peacefully in October 2010 at the age of eighty-five.