Thomas Hardy's Wessex Thomas Hardy's Wessex The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his major novels in the south and southwest of England. He named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in "The Mayor of Casterbridge". In an 1895 preface to the novel "Far From the Madding Crowd" he described
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