The Mayor of Casterbridge The Mayor of Casterbridge The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character is an 1886 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for Dorchester in Dorset where the author spent his youth. It was first published as a weekly serialisation from January 1886. The novel is considered to be one of the Hardy's masterpieces, although it has been criticised for incorporating too many incidents: a consequence of the author trying to include something in every weekly published instalment.
John Gordon (author) John Gordon (author) John Gordon (19 November 1925 – 20 November 2017) was an English writer of young-adult supernatural fiction. He wrote fifteen fantasy novels including "The Giant Under the Snow", four short story collections, over fifty short stories, and a teenage memoir. Most of Gordon's novels are in the supernatural fantasy and horror genres and feature teenagers in the central roles. The adventures are often set in the Fens, an environment Gordon found mysterious and inspirational in his own adolescence, and contain elements of East Anglian folklore such as the "doom dog" – Black Shuck. His work has been