The Hero of Garside School

Paul Percival has never known his father, a naval captain who died at sea before Paul was born. Now twelve years old and returning to Garside School, Paul carries the weight of that absence like a secret shame, watching his mother flinch at every mention of the ocean that claimed her husband. When a mysterious stranger corners him with an urgent message linked to his father's past, Paul is thrust into a dangerous game involving a foreign spy operating within the school's walls. The adventure that unfolds tests not only his courage but his understanding of what it means to be his father's son. Written in 1899, this is late-Victorian school story at its most propulsive: part coming-of-age drama, part espionage thriller, with a boy's desperate need to prove himself driving every page. The result is a book that captures something true about adolescence: the unbearable pressure to be worthy of people we've only known through stories, and the surprising discovery that heroism might look different than we expected.